Sometime around 2010, for some reason, I began to become infatuated with gugak–Korean traditional music. Doubtless it began with visits to Seoul and its enchanting old palaces, folk festivals, and mountains. Friends I made among traditional musicians are part of it too. But gugak is an acquired taste. To many Western ears, some kinds of gugak are difficult to listen to. Somehow, for me it has an ever-deepening appeal, even though the more I delve into it, the stranger it becomes.

I am drawn to gugak’s earthy, sensual sound world. That, along with the intellectual challenge of understanding and applying its elusive techniques, has recharged my composer’s imagination. Now, elements of gugak seem to appear in everything I compose–its structured but flexible approach to rhythm, the expressive shape of every pitch, its standard forms. And it’s not just a vague influence. By now, I have composed four pieces incorporating gugak instruments with Western instruments. Each one is a special challenge because none of these instruments is built to play the Western scale. How to create a sound world where instruments from two cultures co-exist as equals?

For my first gugak-influenced piece, I took on a much bigger challenge than I understood at the time–music for piri and string quartet. The piri is a folk oboe, a deceptively simple bamboo tube, with holes but no keys, and a double reed on top. It’s capable of playing very softly, or very loudly. It is inherently diatonic–there is only one scale, in A-flat. But a good player can produce a complete chromatic scale by altering lip and wind pressure.

Virtuoso player Gamin–who literally wrote the book on modern piri techniques–was my mentor and performer. I listened to hours of gugak recordings to internalize the spirit of the piri, and I studied the rhythmic patterns of sanjo, a classical solo repertory. My goal was to reimagine the rhythms and melodic gestures and form in a new way–like a gugak parallel universe. The string players all had to treat notes in a Korean way–with expressive slides and accents and colors.

Without at that time knowing much about shamanistic music, I decided when it was done that the piece had a severe, mystical sound, so with Gamin’s approval I titled it Mudang–meaning, female shaman. Which is what Gamin had been to me, invoking a new creative spirit in me through contact with ancient Korean musical spirits.

My second gugak-inspired piece would be the finale of my Sinfonietta, which I decided to base on the mask dance–the tal nori–that my wife and I experienced in Andong, a small city far from Seoul. In order to infuse a distinctly Korean sound into the Western orchestra, I purchased a kkwaenggwari–a small gong that’s used as the timekeeper in ensembles like the tal nori, and that has a wonderfully raucous sound, capable of sounding above the orchestra. I loan the gong to the percussion section of any orchestra playing the piece. I again modeled the form of this movement on a slow-to-fast series of rhythmic patterns, ending with fast music very closely modeled on the closing music of the tal nori (which I had captured on video for study).

By this time, I felt the need to move beyond the traditional slow-to-fast gugak form. This made my Nonghyun, a string quintet placing a gayageum inside a string quartet, my most challenging task yet. The gayageum is a plucked-string instrument, laid across the lap. The right hand plucks strings on one side of the moveable bridges; the left hand applies tension on the other side of the bridges to alter pitch and add vibrato. The characteristic sound of the gayageum is rooted in that deep, wide vibrato, called nonghyun. I took inspiration from that sound itself, which is to say from the instrument designed to produce it–not, this time, from the repertory of that instrument. And I began the piece fast, with slow music to follow. The Western strings play mostly pizzicato, creating a giant gayageum; when they change to arco playing, they use extravagant vibrato inspired by that of the gayageum.

My fourth gugak-instrument piece goes even further with combining sound worlds, fusing a haegeum–a two-string fiddle–with the cello. Like the gayageum, the haegeum requires a player to add pressure to the strings to alter pitch, so a “clean landing” on a pitch is not only difficult, it’s un-idiomatic. My Chimera may have only two voices, but the challenge is at least as great as in any of the prior pieces, as each voice is totally exposed.

Creating common ground for instruments from different cultures actually brings new ideas into the world. I have always steered clear of ideas that would bring the Korean instrument into a Western conception–for instance, as a plaintive folk melody over string chords. For me, that’s not a new idea; for me, each piece must be a new conception in some respect. Gugak has blessed me with profound challenges that have revealed new aspects to my creative personality. I have had to dig deep into my imagination and into my soul. And my friendships and working relationships with gugak musicians continue to proliferate. They are remarkably generous with their time and talent, encouraging a Western composer to learn and adapt what they have mastered.

I still compose music without gugak influence–I think. In fact, it’s hard to know what influences are present in new ideas that come to me when I need them. In all likelihood, the study I’ve made of gugak has changed me forever as a composer, has given me new creative tools and new ideas to share. This is how Western music has always expanded and evolved, by learning lessons from other musics. I am proud to have become part of that tradition.

This blog post is adapted from an essay originally written for Forfest, the Czech festival of contemporary arts with spiritual orientation.