About this Piece

“This identity as a Korean person was always an elusive one,” composer Kay Kyurim Rhie reflects. H’on, commissioned by the LA Phil and premiering during its Seoul Festival, dives into Rhie’s experience as a Korean immigrant living in Los Angeles, where she studies, composes, and teaches Western classical music. The piece, she says, “explores the unyielding energy and enduring memories of Korea’s traditional music, interwoven with the gestures etched in my own recollection of it.” Instead of faithfully re-creating the music she heard as a child, Rhie chose to orchestrate her memories. In doing so, Rhie shows that while Korean motifs permeate her music, the inverse is true too: Years of studying Western traditional music have altered her recollections of Korean sounds. H’on negotiates between these inspirations, finding tension and beauty in their contrast. As Rhie’s largest orchestral piece to date, H’on contemplates memory, fragmentation, and identity—all ideas that have long been swirling in her work. 

H’on is built upon elements of Korean traditional music. Describing the discord that these recurring motives produce, Rhie adds: “These elements frequently confront resistance, teetering on the edge of dissolution within intricate, conflicting textures that threaten to engulf them.” The first element, Rhie notes, is the ritualistic percussion that starts the piece. For this motif, Rhie drew upon her memories of visiting Jongmyo, a shrine in Seoul for kings and queens at which stately, ritual music known as Jongmyo Jeryeak is performed. The music’s homophonic and homorhythmic structure mixed with the shrine’s austerity left a frightening impression upon Rhie: “The court music has recurring drum sections punctuated by bak (a wooden clapper); I emulated the cyclic recurrence of the thunderous drumbeats cut off by the dry sound of the whip throughout the piece.” 

Bolstering the eeriness is a type of “sliding glissandi that evoke deep sighs.” These glissandi—often quick escalations followed by slow, drawn-out plunges—sound like a breathing exercise for strings and horns. Through the glissandi, H’on moves from familiar triads of Western music to a detuned and destabilized sound. The sudden dive into the unfamiliar gives the piece a ghostly tone.  

H'on also echoes “the wide, expressive vibratos and dramatic scoops of pansori,” a one-person Korean opera, typically accompanied by a lone drummer. The operatic vibrato rings through H’on, lending dramatic tension while contrasting with another motif, the repeated “sharp pluck of strings,” which seems to suspend time.  

The final motif is the “primal pulse of drumbeats” inspired by Korean percussive music known as Samul nori. Rhie evokes the chaotic nature of Samul nori, using the drums as both driving forces and background characters. Unlike the percussion of Jongmyo Jeryeak, Rhie says, “Samul nori percussions are a bit brighter, with increasing speed and dynamism which H’on emulates in its climax with a feverish cacophony.” 

In Korean, “H’on” means spirit or soul. Rhie says that “it can be used in many different ways,” often to describe “something or someone’s essence,” adding that she titled her composition H’on because it is “the essence of who I am as a person, an immigrant, and a musician.” Despite the piece’s turbulent swings and tempests, “the essence of H’on endures, reemerging in ever-shifting hues throughout the work—too deeply rooted to be suppressed or erased.” In trying to audibly render her spirit, Rhie turned to her earliest memories of music—suggesting that the culmination of sounds she’s heard might be her very soul. —Tess Carges