Korean music in America

I have just returned from a trip to Boston to hear the Spectrum Singers — a classical music choral group — in their early spring performance of songs in English, Latin, German, French and — wait for it — Korean.

The Korean song was “Monnijeo” — “I cannot forget” with the words by Korea’s most famous poet, Kim So-wol. “Monnijeo” is his most famous poem, at least one of the first poems that all Koreans learn in school. The music was written by Jo Hye-yong, and the performance was wonderful. It’s an absolutely beautiful piece of music.

For me, looking at it from a Korean culture point of view, the way I look at everything, I cannot help but think this performance is a kind of milestone for Korean music and Korean culture. K-pop has made a big splash in America, and individual musicians from Korea are found in symphony orchestras around the world. Korean movies — “Parasite” (2019) was the first and so far only foreign language movie to win the Best Picture and Best Director award at the Oscars. "Crash Landing on You," "Squid Game" and other Korean shows have great followings. Korean restaurants are deemed by the New York Times as the finest restaurants in New York. But the music in the performance I attended has broken even a new barrier.

There have been performances of various kinds of traditional Korean music in America, from “pansori” to “samulnori” but the performance in Boston was of choir music with orchestra to compete with the best of the Western composers. That is the new ground broken by this concert — on a program with the greatest Western composers, historical and contemporary.

I could easily be mistaken about this being the first program with a Korean composer writing Western classical music — if you, dear reader, know of others, let me know. Whether this was the first or not, it is a notable achievement separate from the other Korean cultural events that are becoming more and more evident in the West.

After the performance, I filmed several members of the audience and several choir members for the purpose of making a video for my YouTube channel. I started by asking the two men behind me if they would repeat what they had just said — what I had just overheard them saying — for my camera. They agreed. One said to the other, “I could follow the Latin, but I didn’t have any clue of what the Korean was saying.” They knew this performance was one-of-a-kind.

I interviewed a friend of mine, David McCann and his wife. He is a retired professor of Korean literature from nearby Harvard, and I asked him if the pronunciation was good. He said it was perfect.

It turns out one of my best friends, Paul Dredge, is a member of the choir and speaks Korean. It became his duty to coach the choir on their pronunciation. This is not a simple matter. He didn’t have time to teach them to read hangeul, so in two or three rehearsals, he had to teach them with romanization of the text. Any of you who have tried to read Korean through romanization knows how difficult it is to pronounce Korean correctly. There was a romanized text that came with the score, but it was woefully inadequate and inconsistent. Paul had to redo the text and teach the choir the basic sounds of Korean and how they differ from English. Koreans are proud of how consistent their Hangeul is to the desired pronunciation, but English vowels are all over the place — an “o” is pronounced one way in "hole" and another way in "hot." An “a” is one way in "father" and another way in "fate," and yet another in "fat." Teaching good pronunciation using English letters is not an easy task.

I interviewed several of the choir members about learning to sing the Korean words. The choir members tended to be proud of their abilities to sing in various languages — Italian, German, Latin and French were no problem for them. When I asked the question, “Well, now do you want to enroll in a Korean class?” — most laughed or threw up their hands at the thought. One brave singer, in his 70s, boldly said the thought he would like to try.

I interviewed several audience members and found one Korean American who worked at the Berkeley School of Music in Boston who not only gave me a positive evaluation of the singing, the pronunciation and the emotional impact of hearing this beautiful song sung in Korean in an American setting, but he told me he knows the composer. They went to school together. He reported that she has several other compositions that will be debuting in the American and international music scene.

Korean culture is raising its voice in many ways these days. I was overjoyed to see Korea appear on the concert stage with an orchestra and choir in a traditional Western setting.

Mark Peterson (markpeterson@byu.edu) is a professor emeritus of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.