Yoeminrak is a piece of Korean court music written by King Sejong himself in the fifteenth century. This is a “reading” of the original mensural score, realized in SuperCollider. Every note of Yoeminrak becomes a chord—a chord containing all five notes of the original scale. As the piece goes on, I let these mappings drift.
Choreographer HyoJin Kim performed the original dance to the actual ancient Yoeminrak music; my “translation” was substituted after the fact, just as the animation replaced the captured image of her body.
This will be part of a larger work tentatively called Yoeminrak-2040, one chapter in HyoJin’s ongoing Yoeminrak series—a body of work begun in 2018 that carries King Sejong’s music into everyday movement.
