Koh To Play in North Korea

After two years of waiting, South Korean cellist Bong-Ihn Koh ’08 will finally get to play alongside a North Korean orchestra in Pyongyang today.

In 2006, Koh was slated to play in a nearly identical concert to today’s, but the performance was cancelled due to international unrest sparked by North Korea’s first nuclear tests.

This year, however, nothing is getting in the way of Koh’s performance at the Isang Yun Music Festival, named for a late Korean composer.

The three-day event—a joint venture between South Korea’s Isang Yun Peace Foundation and North Korea’s National Isang Yun Institute—will include the first-ever performance of a piece by Isang Yun by both North and South Korean musicians together.

Koh, who currently still lives in Cabot House while he is finishing the last year of his masters degree at the New England Conservatory, will be the only South Korean performing at the event.

Suk Joo Hong, the manager of the music business department at the Isang Yun Peace Foundation, wrote in an e-mail that the concert’s organizers invited Koh to perform Yun’s cello concerto because “Bong-Ihn’s playing Isang Yun’s music has the infinite possibility to contribute to the peace and reunification of North and South Korea.”

Although it is unclear whether North Korea’s “Great Leader,” Kim Jong-il, will attend, higher officers from the North Korean Ministry of Culture, students, and citizens will be among the audience members, Hong said.

Koh said that he’s excited about the cultural exchange that the concert represents.

“Since music is a universal language, this is really showing the rest of the world that through music, we can overcome barriers,” he said.

But the concert will not come without challenges.

Koh’s performance tends to be expressive. In concert, he often shuts his eyes and waves his body back and forth with the cello, as if embracing a lover.

But in North Korea, Koh may need to tone down his style.

Koh said that his colleagues in the North Korean orchestra probably will be performing in “a very strict manner.”

“Even though we have the same language, how do I really convey my ideas?” he asked. “For example, do I play an encore? How do they perceive an encore? Is that allowed?”

Koh said that the cello concerto conveys the anguish Yun felt when he was tortured in a South Korean prison and exiled from his homeland.

“The solo cellist represents [Yun] as a person, and the orchestra represents the world that he lives in,” Koh said. “If you listen to the orchestra, there is a lot going on, and it’s just really frantic and chaotic, and I think that’s how he saw the world at the time.”

Koh’s friends say that they admire his dedication to making music meaningful both in the private and public spheres.

“He doesn’t take music as an end itself but rather as a means for other more human-related goals,” said Samer M. Haidar ’08-’09, a friend of Koh’s. “He believes it’s his duty as a musician to use music as this kind of conduit—dialogue between people.”

Cabot House Master and Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris, who let Koh stay on in the Cabot resident dean’s house this year, said in an e-mailed statement, “This is a dream of a lifetime for him. we are all really happy and proud.”

Jieun Baek ’09, co-founder and director of Harvard Undergraduates for Human Rights in North Korea, wrote in an e-mail from Vienna that she’ll be “praying fervently” for Koh in the next few days while he’s “making history.”

“I cannot begin to express how...proud, amazed, humbled, and in awe I stand before and next to him as a friend and supporter of such great human endeavors,” she wrote.

During his lifetime, Yun sought to reunify the two Koreas through music. Koh said his own dream is to perform someday at a ceremony celebrating the reunification of the two Koreas.

—Staff writer Bonnie J. Kavoussi can be reached at kavoussi@fas.harvard.edu.