NA, Hyo-shin – Music for Solo Kayageum

– Volume I –

Song of Pure Nothing for sanjo kayageum (2019)

Almost Nothing for sanjo kayageum (2019)

Clouds for sanjo kayageum (2020)

Sorrow Like Rain for sanjo kayageum (2020)

– Volume II –

The Wind for sanjo kayageum (2020)

Kayageum Song for sanjo kayageum/voice (2009)

Song of the Firewood for 25 string kayageum (2010)

Kayageum Music for 25 string kayageum (2016)

Many of Hyo-shin Na’s 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.

The title and inspiration of Clouds came from a poem by Wisława Szymborska.

Kayageum Music presents simple materials in a variety of ways, without developing them.

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 (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, 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.