Faculty spotlight
The World at Her Fingertips
For Juyeon Kang, playing music is a spiritual event
In Korea, students fall silent when an instructor enters the room. A command is spoken, and all bow.
American students typically continue their conversations until the official start of class, so it’s only natural that Dr. Juyeon Kang picked up on the cultural differences when beginning her teaching career. One day in class, the assistant professor of music told her Northwestern students she couldn’t help but see the practice as disrespectful.
The next class period, when she entered, a young woman stood.
"Attention! Bow!" she said, and the students did so. They looked at Kang and said, in Korean, "How are you?"
They had sought out a Korean student on campus for a language lesson, turning a clash of cultures into a gesture of respect. Kang was touched.
Kang grew up in Taejon, South Korea. The church plant her family attended had difficulty finding pianists, so Kang's family offered free room and board to individuals who would commit to playing. The pianist also served as nanny and piano teacher to Kang and her three siblings, all of whom played instruments.
When she was three or four, Kang showed ability and interest in the piano. “My mother decided to make me the church pianist,” she says. In time, she did play for the church, eventually moving at age 15 to attend an intensive arts high school in Seoul.
After staying in Seoul for undergraduate and graduate studies, Kang wanted to study in America. At Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., professor Natalya Antonova introduced her to the transcendent power of music. Antonova is Russian, and she’d play passages to demonstrate what she wanted, rather than stumble through articulating her instructions in English.
“Every lesson, I had tears in my eyes,” Kang says. “I realized music is such a powerful tool. That inspired me to work harder.”
Antonova persuaded Kang to enter piano competitions, and she found success nearby in New York City and as far away as Italy. While traveling to Europe and visiting its museums and architectural marvels, “all the arts started to make sense,” Kang says.
“It expanded my understanding of art. My teacher noticed that my playing became more artistic. Before, I was more focused on playing the right notes. Music is not about playing the notes; it’s about much more. It’s about connecting yourself to beauty.”
Kang sees playing music as a spiritual activity. “It feels like praying,” she says. “When I pray very deeply, I focus on God. It feels like I become nothing. I don’t exist. It’s beyond my very self. It’s my spirit communicating with God. Practice is very similar. Yes, I have to focus on physical elements, but once I focus on music, I forget about my fingers. Only the music exists.”
Kang cites three times in her life when music transcended the earthly goings-on in a very specific way. Twice this happened in auditions: once while playing a Mozart sonata, and once, a Grieg concerto.
Another moment happened in a jazz class at Eastman. She was asked to improvise, something classical pianists are not trained to do. “I felt like I was not there; like life was so alive. Everyone in the classroom knew something happened,” she said. But such moments cannot be planned for: “It didn’t happen on the performance day.”
In March, Kang traveled to Colorado with student Kathleen Kropp, and the two performed together at high schools and churches in the area where Kropp was raised. While there, Kang stayed overnight at a convent and played for the elderly sisters. It refreshed her to be there, she says, as she seeks her own way to honor God amidst the travel and the playing and the teaching.
“As I live longer, I feel like I know less. Sometimes, I wonder, ‘Where is my place?’”
This past summer, Kang received a NWC Summer Scholarship Grant to work on some music by Mozart and Schumann as well as arrangements of hymns and worship music. She performed some of her research pieces in Korea, Taiwan, China and Brazil, including Taiwan Presbyterian Seminary College and Korea’s Soong Sil University, two schools with ties to Northwestern.
Kang traveled extensively in Asia last summer as well, researching the potential of a future study abroad location for Northwestern. She remembers being concerned that after leaving her homeland, returning to Midwestern America wouldn’t feel like a good fit.
But, she says, as soon as she walked through the door of her Orange City house, she was content.
“Ahhhh,” she thought to herself, “I’m home.”
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