Entertainment and Artistry Converge in South Korean Concert Halls

It was a torrentially rainy Sunday evening, by all standards a terrible night to go to a concert, but Seoul’s biggest classical concert hall was filled to capacity. The audience wasn’t even just full of old white people like it is in most concerts I go to in North America. I can understand the lack of white people. It’s South Korea, after all. But how was I to explain the young couples who were evidently on dates, or the women in their mid-20s to -30s having a night out with their girlfriends—at a classical music concert, and a chamber music concert at that?

An absurd amount of my time when I’m in the States or in Canada is devoted to anxiety disorder–level worrying about what seems to me to be the impending death of classical music in North America. The rational parts of my brain tell me I am not to worry, that classical music is such an enduring and timeless art form that it is sure to survive. But if, God forbid, our collective attention spans decline and our economy stretches so thin that the death of an entire art form is unavoidable, then where am I going to get the highs that only listening to Mahler symphonies live can give me? Well, I’ll have to go to South Korea, apparently.

The man responsible for filling that concert hall was Richard Yongjae O’Neill, a Korean-American violist. How did a violist, the butt of most classical music jokes in North America, manage to achieve such a feat? O’Neill created and now leads an ensemble named “Ditto” which is shorthand for divertimento. Divertimento is a genre of classical music that was born as background music for social functions in the 18th century, and lightheartedness is at its center. The members of Ensemble Ditto take their namesake to heart. They play approachable music, fun and dramatic classical pieces with loud bangs and emotional phrases.

That doesn’t explain all of their appeal, of course. If that were the case, every “Classical Music Lite” concert would sell out. Ensemble Ditto also happens to be composed of some of the most attractive Korean men I’ve had the pleasure of laying eyes on. They weren’t the most skilled musicians I’ve heard, but they were tall and fit, had great hair, and wore tailored designer suits. I overheard more than a few women swooning over them, and a couple of men complaining about how it was a bad idea to bring their girlfriends to the concert.

The ad campaign for this concert was also nothing like other classical concert ad campaigns. For one, it actually had an extensive ad campaign, unlike most classical concerts. The posters were like posters for rock and pop shows: black and white photography, dramatic lighting, sexy men, and trendy fonts. Ensemble Ditto also made use of social media like Twitter and Facebook, doing ticket giveaways and previews. The thing was, Ensemble Ditto was presenting itself as a group of stars and celebrities, and less as musicians and artists. And it worked.

Classical musicians have long been highly regarded in Korea as stars and celebrities, though not in the same way as Ensemble Ditto. The tradition may have started in 1974 when Myung-Whun Chung brought home a joint second prize at the prestigious International Tchaikovsky competition. At that moment in history it was a big deal that a Korean could even go marching into the Soviet Union, let alone demonstrate that a Korean could excel at something there. He was received back in Korea with a parade reminiscent of the 2008 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony. There’s footage of him standing on a roofless convertible holding a huge bouquet, riding down a main street waving to cheering masses. After years of Japanese occupation, the Korean War, and division into two separate countries, Koreans would take any excuse to demonstrate their nationalism. Classical music became a vessel for such demonstration, and it is to this day.

Indeed, Chung has continued to be the pride of Koreans. The Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra led by Chung signed a 10-record contract with Deutsche Grammophon this past April, making them the first Asian orchestra to be signed by the prestigious label. Despite my impressions from Ensemble Ditto, it’s not as though classical music in Korea is all spectacle and no substance. At this year’s Tchaikovsky competition, five Koreans placed in the final rounds and two of them were first-prize winners.

I felt a lot of admiration for the rapid spread of art in Korea, though there were moments of embarrassment as well. I got press tickets to a performance by the Cambridge King’s College Choir. To start the program, they sang a beautiful, quiet piece with a very subtle ending. I began to clap, but stopped myself abruptly when I realized I was the only one doing so. It wasn’t that the audience members were dissatisfied with the boys’ performance. The Korean audience was so used to the dramatics of classical music that it was out of their minds that a classical piece could end pianissimo.

The Koreans have a solution to this too. There are lectures open to the public all over the city given by music professors and columnists on the basic history of classical music and how best to appreciate it. Il-Bum Chang, a prominent DJ of KBS, the radio station for which I was an intern, gave one such lecture series, and his experience teaching showed through in his commentary on air. He gave fun anecdotes in his incredibly friendly voice, all the while subtly educating all who listened—there were a surprisingly large number of them, too. The station was also making a large-scale attempt to educate the masses; it produced a series of CDs, each of which focused on an important composer and contained explanations of as well as selections from his or her oeuvre.

It was difficult for me to make sense of the contradictory emotional responses I had to my experiences of the classical music scene in Korea. On the one hand, I felt pride for a country whose culture seemed to grow so rapidly—to bracket their even more impressive economic growth. On the other hand, I kept feeling that they were blurring the line between entertainment and art. This feeling was unsettling because classical music is foremost a thing of true beauty for me, and as such is something I hold dear. But perhaps I’ve been holding pretentions all along, thinking that the distinction between entertainment and art is nonnegotiable. One thing I am sure of though: the Koreans’ methods, though worth questioning, are definitely correlated to the rampant vitality of classical music there, and it would do North American musicians good at least to think about taking a new approach.

—Staff writer Susie Y. Kim can be reached at yedenkim@fas.harvard.edu.