ABSTRACT
The remainder of this book is devoted to the music for which Hwang Byungki is best known: his own compositions. In this chapter, we consider how he came to be a composer of ch’angjak kugak and how his first few works arrived at an approach that would become the foundation for a large and diverse compositional output. Hwang’s approach drew on his training (discussed in the previous chapter) as a performer of both chŏngak and sanjo, and also on his strong interest in the music of twentieth-century western composers such as stravinsky and Bartók. This sets him apart from many ch’angjak kugak composers, who are not expert performers and who tend to take their Western influences from the tonal music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rather than the “contemporary” music of more recent times. Thus, Hwang’s blend of ideas from various genres of kugak and from western contemporary music, along with his practical experience as a professional-level kayagŭm player, has informed a distinctive personal “voice” that remains identifiable in works that vary widely in surface sound. Later chapters examine other aspects of Hwang’s compositional voice and the diverse musical contexts through which it speaks, but the present chapter is concerned with how that voice was initially formed in Hwang’s earliest compositions.
