A Physical Music: Okkyung Lee at the Stedelijk Museum

Okkyung Lee, Opening Sonic Acts Academy 2016 at Stedelijk
There was a tangible sense of anticipation in the room as Okkyung Lee picked up her cello. Packed into one of the Stedelijk Museum’s smaller gallery spaces, she played an improvised solo as part of the opening of this year’s Sonic Acts. Raised in South Korea with a background in classical cello, Okkyung Lee began exploring jazz and experimental music after moving to the US in the 1990s, and struck upon noise music as a way to explore the outer limits of the cello timbre. The influence of Lee’s early training is clear. She plays with expert bow control and precision, and with the presence of a performer familiar with the concert stage. Growing up with an understanding of classical acoustics has also proved invaluable for Lee’s practice; as her amplified cello tone oscillated between dense chords and tiny stutters, it never failed to fill every crevice of the room. Hearing Lee play, her music exploits the extremes of the cello’s potential as a physical object. In the classical world, many of Lee’s movements—pitch-bending, aggressively pressing the base of the bow against the strings, or grouping her fingers at the very tip of the fingerboard—are considered ‘extended techniques’. Perhaps it’s a useful way of thinking about Lee’s process as a whole—as an extension of the sonic qualities of the cello, one that stretches but never breaks. That’s not to say that Lee’s solo was an empty display of virtuosity. A sense of layeredness permeated her set; as she repeated certain gestures, little melodies and patterns rose to the surface of the music, which the slightest change from Lee caused to shift or disappear. These moments gave Lee’s improvisations direction, and allowed her to transition from one musical phrase to another in an intuitive way. In a 2015 interview with Adam Potts of The Quietus, Lee explained that the specific sound of the cello is important to her. “I have no real interest in putting the cello through different effects to make it sound like a guitar or other instruments. I started to play noise on my cello because I felt a deep personal connection to it,” she said. “It’s only when I play certain sounds [that] I know that the cello really presents who I am; not my emotions, but who I am as a person.” This personal connection allows Lee to pull non-standard sounds from her instrument viscerally—even in unconventional concert spaces like the Stedelijk—drawing on an archive of noise for an immediate and powerful performance.

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