Strung Between Two Poles
Strung Between Two Poles
Sara Kyoungah White
On Musical Craftsmanship, Metaphors of Unity, and the Two Koreas
I first started playing the cello because my mother wanted me to. She had always loved the sound of it. That first night we brought home the cello in its lumpy black bag and unpacked it, I felt a thrill as I touched the white horsehair and the mother of pearl on the bow, the delicate metal fine-tuners. There was a mystery hiding inside the darkness of the body, one that eluded me no matter how closely I peered through the f-holes. The cube of rosin was like perfume, recalling the scent of forests, and the scroll seemed custom-made to fit the size and curve of my forehead. I instinctively held it up to my face like a baptismal blessing.
As a child, I had never been entrusted with something that seemed so off-limits, intricate, and fragile. I held the bow to the strings, and when I drew it across, I felt the sound vibrate somewhere deep inside my chest. “I had been my whole life a bell,” writes Annie Dillard, “and had not known it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.”
I grew up in a prolifically musical family. I remember Umma playing the piano for us as we danced around the house, songs I can identify by their familiar voice but not by name. Many nights, I would fall asleep to the sound of my dad carefully picking out Bach partitas on his classical guitar from the couch in the living room, or strumming gentle songs like Besame Mucho, which he would sing to my mother when he was happy. Laura Ingalls Wilder had Pa’s fiddle—I had Appa’s guitar. And now I had the cello.
When you first learn to play a stringed instrument, there are many things to figure out: how to hold the instrument correctly, how to keep a steady beat, how to train your finger to fall in just the right place, how to develop an instinct for the right bowings. You learn that putting the bow too close to the bridge makes a scratchy sound; too close to the fingerboard makes it whisper. You learn to control the angles of your wrists and elbows to the tiniest sliver of a degree. You learn how to breathe again. You learn to do things without looking. You develop callouses on your fingers that keep you from feeling pain, but sometimes you bleed. It is an extensive surgery of hours over days over years, surgery to fuse your arms to the bow and your chest to the cello’s hollow heart, until it becomes a ghost that stays with you wherever you are. Only then are you finally ready to make a song.
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In the beginning, there was a tree that grew on the top of a mountain. Over hundreds of years, it learned to stretch tall, strengthening itself to survive in the meager soil and harsh weather. One day the tree is cut down, and it rolls down the mountainside into a river.
“The old timers knew how to find a ‘singer,’” writes German violinmaker Martin Schleske. Legend has it that master luthiers—craftsmen who build or repair stringed instruments— would stand at the rapids of mountain rivers, where felled logs would roll down into the water, listening for the rare trees that, when colliding, would vibrate and sing, their resonances filling the valley.
A stringed instrument is a miracle in the harmony of opposites held in great tension. Harsh conditions lead to beautiful sounds. Fullness blooms from the carved emptiness, scraped into existence by skilled hands. The strings of the instrument and the hairs of the bow are stretched tightly across opposing poles. The fleshly muscles and tendons of the musician then work in tandem opposites to hold, press, and pull against the cold wood of the instrument. Bridge, sound post, pegs, scroll—every element on a stringed instrument is wedged and wound and stretched to the knife’s edge between balance and breaking, on which the musician performs tightrope dances of effortless music.
When done well, to play the violin is, as Martin Schleske puts it, like “prayer cast into sound.” The contradictions of gentleness and great strength come together, creation and created, steward and dominion, two warring nations meeting in a soaring embrace.
What if the body of Christ, with all its tensions stretched and wound tightly between poles, across nations, is like a violin or my father’s guitar? What if all the forces and pressures we feel are meant for song rather than the scrap pile? What if all of it is in the hands of our Lord, the master luthier, the guitar-plucking father, playing his love songs in the night?
Would collisions cause us to sing too?
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In the summer of 2007, the New York Philharmonic announced it was considering an invitation to play a concert in Pyongyang, the reclusive capital of North Korea. By February 2008 three hundred American musicians from New York arrived in the North Korean capital, an unprecedented occasion for two nations that have a long history of conflict. It was the largest group of US citizens to enter North Korea since the Korean War. Time magazine declared, “The oldest U.S. orchestra is using the power of music to pierce North Korea’s isolation [. . .] as the two countries struggle to resolve a protracted standoff over Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program.”
It wasn’t the first time an orchestra was sent as a cultural olive branch from the US to a conflicting nation. The Boston Symphony Orchestra visited the Soviet Union in 1956, and in 1973 the Philadelphia Orchestra played in China.
But to me, as an American-born Korean with roots in both North and South Korea, this Pyongyang concert held special significance. I had grown up in the back halls of orchestra venues and at one time seriously contemplated a career as a cellist. The Pyongyang concert was like watching my two divorced parents meeting for a candlelit dinner for the first time in decades.
“Sometimes the North Koreans don’t like our words,” then-Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill is recorded as saying. “Maybe they’ll like our music.”
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On February 26, 2008, the Pyongyang concert was televised internationally. Members of the New York Philharmonic sat side by side with North Korean musicians to play a repertoire that included Richard Wagner’s prelude to Act 3 of “Lohengrin,” Antonin Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony No. 9, George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris,” and the national anthems of both countries.
The choice of “An American in Paris” is especially confounding, as its jazz-like melodies are actually illegal in North Korea. Kim Cheol-woong, a North Korean pianist who defected in 2002 to South Korea, has said that regular citizens in the North are prohibited from listening to or playing foreign music produced after 1900.
A BBC article tells of how Kim himself was punished by the regime in 1999 for playing a Western love song in his home. He had heard it in a café in Moscow, where he was studying piano with special permission from the government. After being made to write a 10-page apology, Kim decided to flee the country. He arrived at the Tumen River in the middle of the night, where he crossed into northeast China. He worked as a farm hand. One day, he discovered an old piano in a church and wept. Over a year later he was able to go to South Korea, where he has since married. He advocates on behalf of the thousands of North Korean defectors living in the South, and has founded the Arirang Youth Orchestra, which brings together South and North Korean teenagers to make music together.
His reasoning for the orchestra’s name is that the folk song “Arirang” is the only song that both South and North Koreans know. “Arirang” was also in the repertoire for the Philharmonic concert in Pyongyang. “A beloved Korean folk song proved moving for the orchestra’s eight members of Korean origin,” states a New York Times article.
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Before there was a North and South Korea, there was only a Korea. The Korean War lasted from 1950 to 1953 and ended in a stalemate that left the peninsula divided in half by the DMZ, the “demilitarized zone.” Millions of people were separated by the war, and today tens of thousands of South Koreans still have family in the North. I am one of them.
The same month the Philharmonic was considering playing in Pyongyang, I was in a cemetery in Seoul, visiting my grandfather. He is buried in a special cemetery for those whose homelands are in the North, on a hill overlooking the border. One of the first prayers I remember truly praying was when my grandfather died. This grandfather, my father’s father, was always something of a legend and a mystery to me. Due to the Korean custom of never referring to elders by their names—only calling them by social identifiers like “grandpa”—I first heard his full name as an adult. I remember repeating it to myself over and over again so as not to forget it. Nonetheless the syllables seep through my hands like water, and even today his name eludes me. I remember only his last name, the same as mine.
He had grown up in what is now North Korea and then escaped to the south during the war, on foot with my great-grandmother. My grandfather became a diplomat and was a brilliant, hard-working man. He lived in places that sounded exotic to me as a child growing up in Ohio, places like Papua New Guinea, Burkina Faso, Sri Lanka, and Bahrain. But he was also a troubled, harsh, and reclusive man who drank and smoked heavily. When he passed away from cancer in his 60s, only my father was able to go to Korea. On the evening of his funeral, I went into my room, closed the door, and without really knowing why, began to play the prelude of Bach’s second unaccompanied cello suite.
I remember playing this mournful piece and feeling a profound sense that God was listening to my prayer and my sadness, and that he understood it. It was as though the space that existed not only between me and my grandfather, but also between me and God, was momentarily bridged by the intercession of this prayer cast into sound.
Whenever I play or hear this prelude, even today, I always think of that moment in my room; of my grandfather’s death; of all the things in life we cannot ever say or know; and of the space between us and God, a space that is filled, miraculously, with Christ’s compassionate sorrow and deepest love. It is a love that is often hidden, often quiet.
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There is something about music that makes us brave in the face of death, that ultimate divider. The musicians on the Titanic famously played on deck as the ship sank beneath them. I recently asked my husband, “If the world were ending, what would a musician be doing?” “Making music,” he replied.
During the Bosnian war and genocide of the 1990s, the city of Sarajevo was under siege for four years. Buildings were bombed and thousands upon thousands of people died. In one terrible instance, a mortar round killed twenty-two people who had been waiting in line for food in the marketplace square. In response, cellist Vedran Smailović risked sniper shots and bombings to sit among the ruins and play Albinoni’s “Adagio in G minor.” His cello gave voice to the collective grief of his people. “I never stopped playing music throughout the siege,” he said. “My weapon was my cello.”
There must have been a degree of this kind of brazen courage when Lorin Maazel took up his baton on the stage of the East Pyongyang Grand Theater. A New York Times photo of the concert in action has the following caption: “Then Mr. Maazel introduced the next work, Gershwin’s ‘American in Paris.’ ‘Someday a composer may write a work titled “Americans in Pyongyang,”’ he said. In Korean, he added, ‘Enjoy!’ The audience, mostly stony-faced until now, grew slightly more animated.”
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Kim Cheol-woong said of the Philharmonic’s trip to Pyongyang, “I think the concert will change ordinary North Koreans’ view of Americans to some extent. It could soften their negative views of the United States who they have been taught to view as imperialist forces.” He was more optimistic than most. Brian Meyers, an expert on North Korean propaganda at Dongseo University in South Korea, echoed the sentiment of many when he said: “The mere presence of happy, smiling Americans in Pyongyang is in itself not going to accomplish very much at all. You don’t engender goodwill with people who consider you racially inferior. It’s a propaganda gift to them.”
The New York Times reported that “In Washington, on Tuesday, the White House played down the significance of the concert, while criticizing the North for failing to meet its commitments to disarm. Dana Perino, the White House press secretary, said the performance neither hurt nor helped American diplomatic efforts.”
But the musicians themselves seem to tell a different story. John Deak, the principal bassist of the Philharmonic, says that when the Philharmonic musicians started leaving the stage after the concert, the North Koreans waved. “Half of the orchestra burst into tears, including myself, and we started waving back at them and suddenly there was this kind of artistic bond that is just a miracle.”
“I’m not going to make any statements about what’s going to change or everything,” Deak continues. “Things happen slowly. But I do know that the most profound connection was made with the Korean people tonight.”
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Three years before the Philharmonic went to Pyongyang, I found myself at the Tumen River in northeast China, where Kim Cheol-woong had crossed only recently. Today the Tumen River is one of the most heavily-guarded places in the world and one of the most dangerous places to cross from North Korea into China.
I was visiting with a group of Korean-Canadians. Somehow we had found a rental canoe, and, unbelievably, we found ourselves rowing across the river toward North Korea in broad daylight. The river is not wide, the current slow. It is high summer, and the green shrubbery and trees along the North Korean side obscure our view. Everyone is quiet. As we draw near, I see a North Korean soldier’s booted legs between the foliage, patrolling the river’s edge. Does he see us? Maybe this happens all the time, tourists rowing along the river, and he doesn’t think anything of it.
The teammate rowing our canoe almost runs us into the North Korean bank. Suddenly I find myself nearly engulfed by a shrub, its branches in my lap. In an act of defiance, I pluck off three leaves and hide them in my pocket as we pull away. I have them still.
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Sound is vibrating air. In outer space, where there is no air, sound cannot happen. Every note we play can only be heard because of the context into which it sounds. Air cannot vibrate without affecting everything near it.
Physicist and engineer Keith Williams was surprised how the theories of sound waves and vibrations that he knew well from books came to pulsing life beneath his fingers when he first took up the cello. He recalls, “I felt the cello; the whole room responded to it. Windows vibrated; my piano vibrated; even a vase on a coffee table in the next room sang along. The instrument engaged with everything surrounding it.” A trained singer can shatter a glass by singing one sustained note at the glass’ resonant frequency. A bridge resonating with footsteps of marching soldiers can collapse.
What then can a symphony do?
If we consider the Pyongyang concert a metaphor in unity, a bridging of divides, we must also acknowledge that it is at best an incomplete story. The child curiously picks up the instrument and the mystery of it is still elusive. The orchestra ends with an unresolved chord. The canoe goes back to China. The families remain broken. The war goes on.
But one day not too long ago, I suddenly found that I had time to play the cello again. I drew the bow across, just as I had done so many years ago when I held a cello for the very first time. It is said that of all the instruments, the cello is most like the human voice. This voice rippled through me once again, calling me like an antiphonal liturgy, blessing me like a father’s guitar. It is like hearing the sound of singing logs, like finding an old piano in a church, like being greeted by a long-lost relative.
Sara Kyoungah White
Writer & Editor
Sara is a writer and poet living in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She serves as the Senior Editor for the Lausanne Movement.
Photography by Henry Dick
