Korean Performers to Bring Musical Medley to UB

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The contrasting, yet complementary, aesthetics of traditional Korean music will be experienced on Saturday, Nov. 15, when the University at Buffalo Faculty of Arts and Letters welcomes six of Korea's most outstanding performers to the stage of Slee Concert Hall on the UB North (Amherst) Campus.

The program, titled "Korean Music: Tradition and Innovation," will begin at 8 p.m. It will be free of charge and open to the public.

Co-sponsoring the event is The Korea Society of Washington, D.C., and the Korean Culture Program of the Korea Foundation in Seoul, Republic of Korea. The program was launched in 1990 to foster long-term interest and understanding of Korea and its culture among people of the United States.

UB is one of only seven venues on the 1997 Korean Culture Program itinerary. The others are The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Central Connecticut State University, Vassar College, Pennsylvania State University, University of Pittsburgh and the National Council for Social Studies.

The performance will complement the UB Korean Studies Program, which recently became part of the East Asian Languages and Cultures section of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and is experiencing steady growth due to the increasing popularity of Asian languages.

Hae-Kyung Um, a research fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology and Ethnomusicology at Queen's University of Belfast in the United Kingdom, will begin the presentation with a discussion of the characteristics of Korean classical and folk music.

The musical component of the program will feature Jae-won Lim on aegum (transverse flute), Il-ryun Kim playing kayagum (12-stringed zither) and Yoon-jeong Heo on komun'go (six-stringed zither), as well as percussionists Ki-bok Han, Hyun Kwon and Jeong-won Kim.

The concert will consist of five classical pieces from the 18th and 19th centuries and three contemporary compositions from the 20th century.