Trip to the Motherland After Life in the Chiara String Quartet

Hyeyung Yoon
Asian Musical Voices of America
7 min readMay 10, 2019

Author Hyeyung Yoon is a violinist who was a member of the former Chiara String Quartet. She is an active performer and teacher.

Bonfire at the Great Moon Festival at Pilbong Village in South Korea

My daughter and I arrived at Pilbong, a village in South Jeolla Province in South Korea, after traveling around the country for about a month. I have visited the country before to see family and about 5 years ago to perform concerts with my string quartet, a full-time ensemble that I was a part of for 18 years. We decided to go separate ways last year after feeling the need for our individual creative energies to expand beyond our group. After ending the quartet and moving away from a location that I lived for 13 years, I recognized that this was a period of profound change in my life, and it was sacred time. There were open spaces in my calendar for the first time in many years, and I decided to take a trip to my motherland to find out more about folk performance practices of that country. I took my nine year old daughter out of school and boarded a plane together without really knowing what we would experience. After spending a month in the country learning masked dance at the Kosong Ogwangdae Preservation Center for a week and attending various shaman rituals around the country, we came to Pilbong, which was our last stop in Korea before heading back to the states.

I initially planned the trip to Pilbong to see the Daeborum Festival which was taking place to celebrate the first full moon of the Lunar New Year. After finding out they were offering classes teaching the artform that the people of Pilbong Village practiced called pungmul, I enrolled us for a week of sessions that would take place immediately before the festival. We were going to learn how to play the instruments of this particular folk tradition, find out more about the rituals, then be able to witness it come to life in its true form, performed not on a stage but in the open air of the village. In the first class, the teacher suggested that I learn to play an hourglass-shaped drum called jangoo and gave my daughter a kkwaenggwari, a small hand-held gong. As we delved into learning the intricate rhythms and patterns, I noticed that even though my hands wouldn’t go where I wanted them to go and my proficiency in memorizing and executing rhythms was abysmal for a person who has been a musician for more than 30 years, the sounds and beats of the instrument, nonetheless, rang my heart deeply in a familiar way.

Familiarity has often alluded me growing up as an immigrant in the United States. I was often at the margins looking in, desiring what lay before me, but never finding myself within the boundary. Whether it was in a circle of elementary school girls, failing to communicate my English name to them because I couldn’t get my tongue and mouth to sound the r’s and l’s, or feeling lost in the culture of my parents’ Korean church, a community that was less about finding Jesus than an emotional bulwark for adults who have left their homeland and were searching for a sense of belonging, I couldn’t find my true self in either world. I was always in-between, at the margins. Even the decision to obtain U.S. citizenship was filled with so many dichotomies that had to be sorted through. I would live in the United States for the foreseeable future so it made sense to apply for citizenship, but I didn’t feel like I belonged here. Living in a country that was founded and fortified by racist acts, facing microaggressions, outright slurs or preconceptions that came with having a certain pigment in my skin and my eyes shaped a certain way, I asked myself, “why do I need to belong?” I hated being at the margins, but after a while I started to get used to it and eventually enjoy being there. I noticed that I often had contrary views from others, ones that I would only confide to my husband and those closest to me. It gave me solace to tell myself that I was different, and I started to shape my life around this version of myself. The decision to apply for citizenship occurred only after seeing dozens of Mexican men lined up near the 7 train 69th street stop in Queens waiting for vans to pick them up for a day’s work. I thought, “these men would give so much to have a chance to live and work freely in this country,” Feeling guilty, I started the process to be naturalized.

The commitment to finding a true home in the United States came not with the decision to go through the paperwork for citizenship, but with changes in my personal and professional life that were taking place alongside the upheaval that the country was experiencing. With the election of leaders that sowed divisiveness and tribalism emerging to the surface, the country was going through a reckoning. Yet despite the challenges of this time, I encountered light, an inspiration that gave me hope and direction. After reading a book called Music in Korea by Donna Lee Kwon, I became fascinated with a Korean concept called madang, which translates to an open space, usually outdoors, where rituals, performances, meetings occur. In a deeper and more nuanced meaning, it can also refer to a time and space where boundaries that exist between different groups of people are obscured. When attending a madang performance, an environment is created where audience interacts with the performers by vocally or even physically participating in the performance. Whether you are female or male, young or old, rich or poor, all are accepted and free to express.

The main teacher and leader, a person that is responsible for keeping Pilbong Village’s pungmul traditions alive and flourishing, is a man that looks like an ordinary middle aged person walking down the street or riding next to you on the subway. I actually made an embarrassing mistake of asking him whether he was one of the participants when I was introduced to him. Even with the Daeborum Festival right around the corner, he took time out of his busy schedule to visit our class. He was charming and so full of life and joy for the music. He told stories, jokes, and played his jangoo for us, which was electrifying and thrilling. He also talked about the meaning of the word goot, which, because of my Christian upbringing, I always associated with a ritual where a shaman would drive out evil spirits from a place or person, a sort of an exorcism. He shared that the elders of his village would define goot as a gathering of people to ensure the harmony and peace of their community. Telling a story to a group of people can be defined as a goot and any of my performances as a violinist can be also.

Ritual at the Pilbong Village’s Guardian Tree

The Daeborum festival started in the early afternoon. There were food and merchandise stands, a wood fired oven that cooked sweet potatoes, and a man walking around with scissors cutting and selling traditional candy called yut. People were crouched over electrical ranges with small handheld pans where they were melting sugar and adding bits of bakings soda to make candy. After milling around the market delighting in childhood memories, the rhythmic sound of the kkwaenggwari finally rang across the open space and the goot began. The musicians and the audience first gathered in the main madang space, then started to walk around the village to plant, by foot, good energies into the earth surrounding landmarks. The procession stopped at various sites like the guardian tree where the ritual table was set up with food and drinks, at the spring, and at individual houses. With each stop, there was singing and instrument playing that lifted everyone’s spirits. After 4–5 hours of continuous music, there was a dinner break, then everybody gathered again at the madang for the last performance.

As a musician myself, I was fascinated by the way this evening performance unfolded over the next three hours. In classical music concerts, there’s often a separation, physically and cognitively, between the performers and audience members. Because of the stage, boxed seating, and minimal interaction between audience and performers, there’s often a feeling that you are observing an artwork behind a line. In this space, however, the goot began by one of the performers emphasizing that they welcomed and needed audience participation. He encouraged us to dance, sing, and use choo-im-sae by vocally responding to the music and giving support to the performers and each other by yelling phrases like “It’s good” or “you’re good.” I loved that Koreans had a word to describe the act of vocally lifting others’ spirits up and wished that audience members in my classical music concerts would cheer me on when I’m playing a particularly difficult piece. The performance was rowdy filled with people singing, dancing, and yelling. There were times when the musicians would perform for us in the center of the madang but also times when they would move outside of the circle and let the audience spill into the middle. The musicians then encircled us allowing us to dance, sing, be silly, and move within the circle with abandon. I was back in Korea, a place I left when I was right around my daughter’s age. Facing the circle with a renewed desire to find my true home wherever I was, effortlessly and without thought, I took my daughter’s hand and stepped in.

This article was originally published on the Korean Quarterly in 2019

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Asian Musical Voices of America
Asian Musical Voices of America

Published in Asian Musical Voices of America

Platform for Asian Classical Musicians to Share Stories, Experiences, and Creative Acts

Hyeyung Yoon
Hyeyung Yoon

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