Hyo-shin Na
Contemporary classical music composer
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Early Years
Hyo-shin Na (b. 1959, Seoul, Korea) received her undergraduate degree from Ewha Woman’s University in Seoul, her MM from Manhattan School of Music and DMA from the University of Colorado, Boulder. After moving to San Francisco in 1988, she was twice awarded the Korean National Composers Prize, in 1994 for Western instrumental music (Variations) and in 2003 for Korean traditional instrumental music (Fragmentary Study).
Educated during her years in Korea primarily in the traditions of Western music, Na wrote Variations for piano solo in 1990, at a time when she was moving away from these traditions. Instead of a “theme,” Variations springs from an interval, and unfolds in continuous variation on the interval in seven larger sections instead of in a series of clearly delineated variations. The texture is transparent, the piano sounding more like a melodic than a harmonic instrument.
Two of her works from 1997, Transcription and Dirge, possess a similar non-developmental character and, with them, Na continued on a path leading away from traditional European, or Western, aesthetics. Both pieces have their origin in Korean vocal music – Dirge in the Korean folk song “Sanyombul” and Transcription in “Chichang-pulgong,” a Buddhist chant for the dead. A substantial section of Dirge is written in spatial notation; the violinist and pianist are asked to coordinate not by counting rhythms in the traditional sense, but by listening and reacting to the other player’s part. In Transcription, which was commissioned by the Fromm Foundation at Harvard and premiered by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, a string quartet plays the melodic chant material, sometimes only loosely synchronized. A percussionist playing temple block, tom-tom, marimba and a middle-sized gong provides rhythmic punctuation and an occasional drone.
Further Study
In 1999, Na spent two months living in Seoul, attending rehearsals and concerts at the National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts; she also studied kayageum at this time with the eminent composer and kayageum player Byung-ki Hwang (she’d previously studied kayageum in 1988 and 1994). In the autumn of 2000 she initiated a series of seven wide-ranging conversations with Professor Hwang at his Ewha University office and Seoul home; these sessions became the basis for her book “Conversations with Kayageum Master Byung-ki Hwang.” Such studies and experiences led to a series of works for traditional Korean instruments, both solo and in ensemble, sometimes combining with western instruments:
Date
Work
Instrumentation
1999
2000
2000
2000
2001
2002
2002
The Wind Has No Destination
Blue Yellow River
Chung-Ji-Hyang
While Searching for the Way
Akhmatova’s Muse
Ocean/Shore
Fragmentary Study
solo kayageum
kayageum, cello, double bass
taegeum, piri/saenghwang, peopgeum
traditional Korean orchestra
flute, oboe, taegeum, piri, kayageum
western chamber orchestra, piri solo
traditional Korean orchestra, 25 string kayageum solo
Her writing for traditional Korean instruments continues to the present, and even extends to non-Korean Asian instruments:
Date
Work
Instrumentation
2018
2019
2019
2020
Melody of Wave II
Cloud Study IV
Song of the Fog
Sorrow Like Rain
shinobue, koto
haegeum, sanjo kayageum
clarinet, violin, bass koto, piano
sanjo kayageum
It’s particularly interesting to look more closely at Akhmatova’s Muse from 2001, given the connections between instruments: taegeum/flute, piri/oboe, and the seeming “misfit” of the ensemble, kayageum. Resisting the urge to exploit the obvious pairings, Na deliberately avoided writing for “western” or “eastern” instruments. She had no interest in displaying the contrast between the sound of piri and that of the oboe, nor that between taegeum and flute. She felt no need to balance the sound of the lone kayageum with the sound of the wind ensemble and was not attracted to the idea of making the flute and oboe sound more “Korean.” More crucial for her was something like the tuning of the kayageum, where she used her own unique “zig-zag” tuning – here alternate strings are tuned to the same pitch. This piece is a clear example of Na’s refusal to compromise the integrity of differing sounds and ideas; she prefers to let them interact, coexist and conflict in the music.
Another excellent, but quite different, example of this approach is Echoes of Harmonious Music from 2012 for kayageum and koto. Here, both instruments play basically the same music, but each instrument plays in its own particular way – the kayageum tends to play in triple meter with lavish ornamentation; koto plays more in duple meter with minimal ornamentation.
Music for Piano
Na has been particularly prolific when it comes to writing music for pianists. As of 2020, she has written 15 solo piano and 31 chamber works that include piano. The solo works, in particular, have attracted the attention of younger pianists such as Kevin Lee Sun, Tysen Dauer, Eric Tran, Soyeon Kang and Jihye Chang. Pianists of an earlier generation that have given performances of Na’s music include Susan Svrcek and Thomas Schultz. The solo works are:
Date
Work
1990
1997
1999
2001
2001
2002
2003
2008
2010
2012
2012
2014
2016
2018
2019
Variations
Piano Study 1
Rain Study
Piano Study 2
Piano Study 3
Sleeping Muse Study
Walking, Walking
A Portrait
Sea Wind
Near and Dear
Elaine’s Song
After Walking
Meadow Study
Small Noise
Great Noise
The longest of the solo pieces is Walking, Walking (2003), 25 minutes made of 6 sections using material from the Chilean composer/singer Victor Jara’s song Caminando, Caminando. Much of the music shares with the act of walking a meandering quality, and culminates at the end of the piece in a gradual coalescence of the rhythmic, melodic and harmonic elements of Jara’s song. After hearing Walking, Walking, the composer Christian Wolff remarked on the character of the music: each section is simply followed by the next section, with no need for development or transition.
Between 1997 and 2016 Na wrote a series of Studies; etudes for the pianist but also for the composer. Rain Study from 1999 concerns the layering of melodies and the superimposition of the pianist’s hands, continuing an exploration of these elements that began with Piano Study 1 (1997). The initial section of Rain Study is written using spatial notation and, as in Dirge, much of the piece’s material has its origins in the Korean song “Sanyombul,” whose text states:
The sun that sets will rise again tomorrow, a life that passes will never return. . . .
The particular focus of Piano Study 1 is on the sustained notes that result when two melodies overlap.
Na finds ideas for new pieces in a variety of sources – the world of music, literary works, visual art, nature, everyday happenings. She wrote Meadow Study (2016) after reading Czeslaw Milosz’s poem “A Meadow,” not attempting to parallel each line in the poem with something in the music, but rather seeking to convey a feeling evoked by the poem, distilled, in this case, possibly in two lines:
I searched for it, found it, recognized it /…all knowing ceased
Small Noise (2018) and Great Noise (2019) originated in a similar manner, but, this time, with the Kafka story “Great Noise.” Piano Study 3 (2001) is based on a short, animated Norwegian melody, and Piano Study 2 (also from 2001) uses materials found originally in Schönberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19.
Even in an early piano piece like Variations, Na’s use of grace notes plays a crucial role in the music’s character. In the central slower section of the piece, almost every “main” note has a grace note preceding it. The sheer number of grace notes both complicates and lightens the rhythmic flow of the music, at the same time filling out the melodic/harmonic outline. Interestingly, at this point in Na’s writing, it’s really only the proliferation of grace notes in the score that sets it apart from the tradition in western music. In Rain Study (seven years after Variations), the presence, again, of numerous grace notes, now both preceding and following the main notes, has a similar effect as in the earlier work but, here, both grace notes and spatial notation appear in the first half of the piece, greatly compounding the complexity and unpredictability of rhythms and musical flow. A similar presence and importance of grace notes in Piano Study 1, Piano Study 2, Piano Study 3, and Near and Dear reflects a shift away from the “ornamental” grace note present in the music of, for instance, Bach, Mozart and Schubert, to the grace note as an integral element in Na’s music.
In Piano Study 2, Na writes a short passage where certain keys are held down, but still “played” as part of a larger melodic line, rather in the manner of Ligeti’s Touches bloquées, creating an ongoing irregularity in the rhythm. With Cloud Study III (2018) for violin and piano and in the central section of the solo work Great Noise (2019), she combines both these held notes and a profusion of grace notes to produce a unique layering of elements, a new sort of polyphony.
Music for Kayageum
Na has also written many works for solo kayageum. Between 1997 and 2020 she wrote eleven pieces for either sanjo kayageum or 25-string kayageum:
Date
Work
Instrumentation
1997
1999
2000
2009
2010
2016
2019
2019
2020
2020
2020
Chichangpulgong
The Wind Has No Destination
Upon Returning From Seok-gu-ram
Kayageum Song
Song of the Firewood
Kayageum Music
Song of Pure Nothing
Almost Nothing
Clouds
Sorrow Like Rain
The Wind Has No Destination II
sanjo kayageum
sanjo kayageum
sanjo kayageum/voice
25-string kayageum
25-string kayageum
sanjo kayageum
sanjo kayageum
sanjo kayageum
sanjo kayageum
sanjo kayageum
Many of the solo kayageum pieces have their origin in literary texts. Ezra Pound’s “The Lament of the Frontier Guard” (a translation from the Chinese poet Li Po) was the start of Sorrow Like Rain:
. . . Bones white with a thousand frosts.
High heaps covered with trees and grass;
Who brought this to pass?
and
Ah, how shall you know the dreary sorrow at the North Gate,
With Rihaku’s name forgotten,
And we guardsmen fed to the tigers.
Song of Pure Nothing comes from the poem by Guillaume de Poitiers (the beginning, translated here by W. S. Merwin):
I’ll make a song of pure nothing,
not about me or another being,
not about love or being young
or anything.
it came to me while I was sleeping
on my horse riding.
Almost Nothing began when Na read a comment by the Polish painter Jozef Czapski: “Each time it is almost nothing. But that ‘almost nothing’ signifies everything.”
The title and inspiration for Song of the Firewood came from a short poem by Jaime de Angulo, who lived mostly in California as a linguist, musicologist and poet:
I am old, twisted, dry. I am cold.
Build the fire.
Heh! Heeh-heh … he-he-he … feel good.
Let the chief call the dancers.
In Kayageum Song, the words sung by the kayageum player, as she also plays the instrument, are from a poem by the Korean nun Haein Lee, expressing a quiet pleasure in being alive. Traditionally, the instrumental part in kayageum byungchang, where the musician both plays the kayageum and sings, is relatively simple. But here, in a nod to the exceptional qualities of the musician who gave the first performance of the piece, Hyunchae Kim, Na has written a virtuosic kayageum part.
The Wind Has No Destination II (2020) follows The Wind Has No Destination (1999) in asking the player to pluck strings on the left side of the bridges in addition to the usual way of playing kayageum (plucking the strings on the right side of the bridges). Plucking on the left side, which is relatively rare in traditional kayageum music, produces sounds of indeterminate pitch which often do not coincide with the general tuning used in the piece. In fact, for notes played this way, the pitch notated in the score indicates not the resulting sound, but only the string that is to be played. In the work from 2020, Na wanted to expand the use of this playing technique and also to make the notation communicate more directly to the player what is to be done.
In general, the kayageum sound has been considered to have 3 distinct registers. Each passage in a piece would tend to stay in one of these registers – high, middle or low. However, in certain pieces, for example Sorrow Like Rain or The Wind Has No Destination II, Na treats the entire range of the instrument as one “register,” introducing the possibility of larger intervals and a more disjunct character to the music, as well as melodies that can range much farther over the instrument’s entire range.
Na has frequently written for the the kayageum as part of an ensemble. She has written 16 works where the kayageum appears in an ensemble made solely of traditional Korean instruments, and 8 works where the ensemble of which kayageum is a part includes either western or Japanese instruments.
Music for Koto
Na’s music for the Japanese koto deserves special mention. Between 2003 and 2019, 6 pieces for solo koto or solo bass koto and 28 ensemble pieces including koto were the result of her personal friendships with Japanese koto players, particularly Shoko Hikage.
The similarities between koto and kayageum are many; the dissimilarities begin with the much greater tension of the koto’s steel strings compared to the relative flexibility of the silk strings of the kayageum. This is possibly the main reason for the substantial difference in sound between the two instruments: the koto player uses artificial fingernails (often made of mother-of- pearl) and is limited in how much ornamentation/vibrato/pitch bending she can do; the kayageum player, playing on less rigid strings with her fingertips (and occasionally with her own fingernails) applies these subtle changes of pitch to nearly every note she plays.
The pieces for solo koto are:
Date
Work
Instrumentation
2010
2011
2011
2012
2013
2014
Night Procession of the Hundred Demons
Night Procession of the Hundred Demons
Koto Music
Music for 25 String Koto
Five Pieces on Yoshie Hikage’s Poems
The Sky Was Beyond Description
version for solo bass koto
version for solo koto
solo koto
solo 25 string koto
solo koto
koto/bass koto (one player)
The versions of Night Procession of the Hundred Demons for solo koto and solo bass koto are taken directly from the 2008 piece of the same name for 3 bass kotos (or any multiple of 3). Koto Music (2011) has its origin in the piece for 2 pianos from 1988 entitled The Music; the overall structure of the 2 pieces is basically the same, but the music within each of the three main sections is substantially different, reflecting the completely different sound of the respective instruments. In 2016, Na wrote Kayageum Music for 25 string kayageum – translating the earlier Koto Music into the sound and playing technique of the kayageum. Both of these solo instrumental pieces were written specifically at the request of players of the instruments – Koto Music for Shoko Hikage and Kayageum Music for members of the Kyungki Kayageum Ensemble.
The Sky Was Beyond Description (2014) presents the koto player with a new challenge – the unusual situation of one musician playing both koto and bass koto, at times simultaneously.
Writings and Lectures
In addition to the numerous performances and recordings of Na’s work by solo instrumentalists and ensembles, there’s a growing scholarly interest in her work. Some of the dissertations on her music (or containing sections on her music):
- Music by Korean Women Composers – Hyo-shin Na’s “Variations for Piano” – Ramona Sohn Allen, Claremont Graduate University, 2000
- Korean-Euro Dualism and Selected String Compositions by Hyo-shin Na –Hanna Yu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008
- Compositions by Hyo-shin Na – Jeong-Hwa Park, Arizona State University, 2008
- Cultural Co-existence: Traditional Korean Music and Western Art Music in Hyo-shin Na’s “Chohanga 2” and “Song of the Midnight Battlefield” – You-kyoung Kim, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2014
- Born in the 20th Century: Contemporary Flute Works by East Asian Female Composers – Grace Ju-Yeon Wang, University of Maryland–College Park, 2019
Na lectures frequently on her music; most recently at Seoul National University and Ewha Woman’s University in Korea, the Universität der Künste in Berlin and, in the U. S., at Texas A & M University, Stanford University, Haverford College, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and in a series of lectures at various branches of the San Francisco Public Library. In 2017 she gave the keynote lecture at “Keeping Music Alive: Women Composers in Digital Music Archives,” the International Conference of the Ewha Music Institute.
Na’s bilingual book, Conversations With Kayageum Master Byung-ki Hwang was published in Korea in 2001 by Pulbit Press and her music has been published since 2006 by Lantro Music in Belgium.
Author – Thomas Schultz
Thomas Schultz has established an international reputation both as an interpreter of music from the classical tradition – particularly Bach, Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt – and as one of the leading exponents of the music of our time. Among his recent engagements are solo recitals in New York, San Francisco, Berlin, Paris, Ghent, Seoul, Taipei and Kyoto, and at the Schoenberg Festival in Vienna, the Piano Spheres series in Los Angeles, Korea’s Tongyoung Festival, the Festival of New American Music in Sacramento and the April in Santa Cruz Festival. From 2004 to 2011 he gave a series of six recitals at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, playing repertoire ranging from major works by Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert and Chopin to rarely heard music by by Schoenberg, Rzewski, Cage and Na. He has also given recitals in New York at Bargemusic and the Goethe Institute. In 2005, 2010, 2014, and 2017 he gave masterclasses on the piano music of the Second Viennese School at the Schoenberg Center in Vienna and in 2016 gave performances of the complete solo works of Schoenberg in Vienna, San Francisco, Seoul and Taegu, Korea. Beginning in the summer of 2018, he is giving an annual series of masterclasses for young artists at Stanford University. He has been a member of the piano faculty at Stanford University since 1994. He has premiered and recorded numerous solo and chamber works by Hyo-shin Na.
Listening Links
Ocean/Shore 2 for clarinet, violin, viola, and cello
The Sway of the Branch for haegeum and violin
Cloud Study III for violin and piano
That Old Woman for 25 string kayageum and bass koto
PIA for piri and piano
External Links
Website :: http://hyo-shinna.com/
Facebook :: https://www.facebook.com/HyoshinNa/
Wooden Fish Ensemble Facebook :: https://www.facebook.com/WoodenFishEnsemble/