…felt like it was guided by fate. As soon as I decided that I wanted to write about the haegeum, I contacted Dr. Ahn, the one who offered me her settings of Korean folk songs. It turned out that she knew Soo-Yeon Lyuh, and even gave me her personal email address so I could contact her for an interview. Before reaching out to Soo-Yeon, though, I decided to look her up online, and promptly discovered that her next performance was in my hometown of Santa Cruz. Specifically, she was performing with the youth symphony I used to play flute for… the very symphony through which my roommate and I had met.

My project legitimately could not have been made easier. I asked my roommate if she’d like to come with me and watch Soo-Yeon play haeguem with our old symphony accompanying her, and she said yes. I then contacted my old conductor, who still remembered me, and managed to get an interview quote from him about why he had programed haegeum for the youth symphony. Finally, I contacted Soo-Yeon for an interview, so I could learn more about the instrument and how it worked. Dr. Ahn had told me that Soo-Yeon loved talking about her instrument, and such was the case; she answered my query with a resounding yes and we scheduled a time in a matter of days.

Now, this happened in the fall of 2018, one of the first years that California was bathed in smoke due to the spike in forest fires. At my undergrad institution, the smoke got so bad that classes were cancelled for weeks, but I was still determined to finish my project. I drove through two hours of smoke to interview Soo-Yeon in the depths of Berkeley, California, and later my roommate and I fled to Santa Cruz so we could both escape the toxic air up north and attend the aforementioned concert. I had a great time and, perhaps most importantly, learned a couple very interesting things about the haegeum.

First, Soo-Yeon told me that “haegeum is the most challenging instrument.” This is a lofty claim, but I don’t have much trouble believing it in context. For one, there’s no standardization between instruments—all haegeum have two strings, but the two pitches those strings are tuned to varies. “When we tune, we just make sure there’s a perfect fifth between [the strings],” Soo-Yeon said. The pitches become even more difficult to discern because the strings are made of twisted silk, which tightens or unfurls depending on humidity and pressure. As such, the pitches of the strings change, even while playing; Soo-Yeon told me of a personal experience in which her haegeum’s strings slid by an entire half step within the span of one performance. No fingering is guaranteed to result in a specific pitch.

(Personally, I wonder if this is where the wide vibrato in haegeum-playing originally came from, to cover up the inconsistency of pitch in a stylish way. But, answering that question would require more research, and regardless, there are probably other factors involved.)

The other thing I learned about the haegeum was its similarities to wind intruments, despite it being a bowed fiddle. This was foreshadowed by my roommate’s comment that “haegeum is like crying,” but it goes further than that. In our interview, Soo-Yeon told me that it was historically called the “beggar’s instrument,” because people used its ‘voice’ for begging on the streets. The instrument’s plaintive, nasal timbre sounds strikingly similar to a voice, or at least a wind instrument; when playing a solo haegeum sample for college students at my undergrad institution, I got guesses including voice, trumpet with harmon mute, and flute.