Seoulstyle.com - Bringing It All Back Home

For hundreds of years Irish traditional music has been resonating in all corners of the globe, warming the hearts of many a lonely exile. However, for the past four years Irish music has come to roost in the most unlikeliest of places, around the dormant Nuclear Magnetic Resonance machine at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) in Seoul.

For several years many Irish graduates, enticed perhaps by the exoticism of a Confucian culture, have been visiting Korea to try their hand at teaching English. However, it is not solely the Irish who can claim the credit for bringing Irish traditional music to Korea.

Dr Hae-Young Koh, neuroscientist at Korea Institute of Science and Technology, had her first real taste of Irish traditional music while studying on the neuroscience program at the State University of New York at Albany (SUNY Albany) in 1997. At that time a fellow musician in the SUNY string quartet introduced her to the local folk music community. Despite having played both piano and violin from the age of six, Dr Koh had rarely encountered Irish music or "English Folk Dance”, as she remembers one jig being described in her elementary piano music collection:
"… In this little piece I recognized something very different from any other piece in the collection, and I studied it intensely …. A quarter of a century later in Albany, New York, I finally learned the actual name of that piece: "The Irish Washerwoman” and I also learned its ‘long-lost’ part ‘B’!”
"Fiddlers’ Tour”, the local Tuesday night folk session in Albany, exposed Dr Koh to a wide repertoire of folk music ranging from Cajun, to Irish to Yiddish. Dr Koh played at the music session from 1997 to 1999 and in that time developed a deep interest in Irish music:
"During that period, I came to crave more and more Irish pieces and struggled hopelessly to find the proper ways of playing traditional Irish tunes.”

Early in March, 1999 while working on the very last series of laboratory experiments to prepare for her thesis, Dr Koh attended a fiddle workshop in Albany with the internationally acclaimed Irish fiddler, Martin Hayes.
"I was in total "shock” the moment I heard the very first bow strokes of Mr Hayes’s version of "The Jug of Punch”. I was already familiar with the tune but had never heard it played in such a moving way. It sounded like a whole new tune. It was another world.”

After graduating from SUNY Albany in 2000 Doctor Koh moved to New York City to work on her postdoctoral fellowship at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. In New York she started playing at local music sessions. The following year she made the first of several trips to the Willie Clancy Summer School in Clare, Ireland.

"In the process of learning new tunes, picking them up at music workshops and sessions or even from CDs, I gradually came to realize that the music which most attracted me was the music of Clare and Galway in the west of Ireland."

In 2005 Dr Koh left New York and returned to Seoul to work as a senior research scientist/associate professor at the government affiliated research institute, KIST. In the summers of 2007 and 2008 she made the long journey from Incheon to Ireland for the traditional Irish music festival at Feakle, County Clare.

In short, since her initial introduction to the music of Galway and Clare in 1999 Dr Koh’s fiddle had taken second place only to her research. Since her Dempsey’s, Blaggard’s and Mona’s Pub session days in New York she has paid numerous trips to Ireland and attended workshops with the best if Irish fiddle players including, Martin Hayes, Pat O’ Connor, Mick Conneelly, John McEvoy, James Kelly and others.

Dr Koh does not confine her interest to the Irish fiddle alone. Over the past ten years she has also developed a deep interest in Sean Nós (Irish traditional) singing and lilting which she also finds reminiscent in its lonesome nature of the Korean folk music of the fields.

Consequently, on a Saturday afternoon the diligent scientists putting in weekend overtime at KIST are on occasion treated to the lonesome sound of Irish tunes such as "The Rolling Wave” or "Tell Her I Am” wafting around the huge deserted auditorium where the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance machine sits dormant for the weekend. Meanwhile, Doctor Koh regularly attends sessions with the up and coming Korean Irish traditional band "Bard” which has also done more than its fair share in the nurturing of Irish traditional music in Korea.

Perhaps it is no surprise that Irish traditional music should come home to roost in a country with a history of colonial occupation, civil war, poverty and emigration to parallel Ireland’s own story. At any rate, thanks to Doctor Hae-Young Koh, Irish music has found a new home. Long may it warm the Korean heart.