Kunsu Shim
Gerhard Stäbler and Kunsu Shim in conversation:
GS: Winter in Bergen: darkness, rain, a crack of sunshine (only) – best time of the year for music?
KS: Music seems to reflect something, in which it can be reflected – light, darkness, rain etc., but for me, music itself is far from those things. So, there is no best time for music. But a specific state of environment, for example, a dark, rainy and windy day gives a certain sense of sonic circumstance, that could be listened to as music itself.
GS: I agree, and I see music needs surroundings that let you „hear“, for example a silent room, a quiet hall, a night that is full of stars – no wind, no rain, and a comfortable temperature. This I would take as the usual presuppositions for being able to get a deep musical reception. I also see a chance for music in an environment, that is „loud“, as I'd like to try with my composition „HELIOS NORDWÄRTS“, that implants music into the harbour of Bergen with its traffic, its market, and its daily weather conditions. I'd like to accentuate everyday life with musical sounds that makes the ears – hopefully – open again, and let us realise that we are constantly bombarded by everlasting and omnipresent ambient music.
KS: I am curious to know how you are going to put together all the differences? What we are doing as composers, is (re)organizing the senses. Sounds in the environments are always functional. For me it is essential that sounds should be (re)born as a sensual body free from their daily-life-functions. I also did several open-air projects. One of them was called „here - open air“ as a performance with bicycles, fire, an artificial moon and musicians. The other one was called „places with airhorn“, an open-air performance for two weeks, in which I was playing just a single long sustained sound on a ship horn – but very gently – at a certain time of day. Perhaps you are trying to mark „the environment“, such as the fish market in Bergen, which turns a place into a „happening“; I am trying to be a part of the environment, I want to be involved in something taking place. For me music is still something open. The sense of sounds could be completely newly organized, if we could find the possibilities...
GS: ...and what music means to us. Most of your music – for example especially those for performance halls – leads the listener to a kind of inner sound world, you concentrate on listening to sounds that exist in the present - lets us hear their existence. And much of my music combines experiences of all our senses – listening, seeing, smelling, feeling... I am very much interested in engaging musicians in making music at a specific site – as Bergen's harbour or the former textile factory in Salhus – working with the existing sounds of those sites, and confronting them with added sounds composed of rotating helicopters, horns from fire engines, the rattling of weaving machines etc., in combination with instrumental musical structures created by brass players, and young people with traditional string instruments etc.
KS: I am also very interested in the various sources of klangkörper - sound bodies. The noise of helicopters in the sky is of course not comparable to one single tone on a piano. These are two very different worlds. But what appeals to me is that there are two (or more) worlds in one universe. Don't you, too? A crack of sunshine in winter in Bergen expresses itself as much as the striking brightness during the summer in Busan, where I was born. There are always specific beauties in any kind of environment.