When east meets west

For the past few days, there has been a steady flow of melody from the building of the Korean Cultural Centre. Sometimes it is Beethoven’s seventh symphony, sometimes some rhythmic beats and sometimes familiar tunes of what we call ‘Bollywood music.’ When we took a look inside we found six music teachers from Korean National University of Arts trying to train young, budding Delhi musicians the nuances of Western music. language seemed to be a temporary barrier as they let notes talk for them.

The team is in the city as part of the third Dream Project, an initiative which encourages people from both nations to foster bonds through music. The project requires a student to audition  first and a few chosen ones get to train under them. We come to know that after a week-long training, the students will be presenting their piece today at the centre, along with their teachers. 

Pianist Kim Daebum was happy at the sheer number of participation but was disappointed when she found that students theoretical knowledge of their instruments. Most of them couldn’t read the score (music sheet/notations) properly. “So we are training them to learn to read the score. All the teachers are focussing on brushing up the basic skills of the students,” she said. 

Vocalists Kim Do A and lee Jangwon are training the students in Italian art songs because they feel that is very important. “The Western Classical vocals started in Italia. So, it is important to familiarise the students with the base,” Jangwon pointed out.like India, Korea, too have its own traditional music and dedicated musicians. Violinist Moon Yedam told us that traditional Korean music includes combinations of the folk, vocal, religious and ritual music styles of the Korean people. 

The team explained to us two classical music of their country. “Pansori is a Korean genre of musical storytelling performed by a vocalist and a drummer,” explained guitar lee Jae Eun. We learnt about samul nori, a genre of traditional percussion music which is performed with four traditional Korean musical instruments collectively called pungmul.

Pianist Shin Chanme said, “We are always thirsty for Western Classical Music. Since it started originally in Europe and very royal, we feel there is a huge gap between our ability and the European style of Western classical music. But the more we learn the more secrets and new things are revealed to us.”

When we asked if they are familiar with Indian music they said that the sound track of the movie Eat, Pray, love starring Julia Roberts was one of their favourites. “It has a good number of Hindi sound tracks,” said Kim Do A. But we were quite surprised when they belted out the song All is Well, sans the words.