It is always with guilt that I make my come-back after a long, unannounced hiatus. I do this with my journal, too, even though no one is reading the entries except me. With whopping 16 people following my blog (I am not being sarcastic. I really appreciate my followers. Without you, this blog would be voiceless), you can imagine the magnified guilt. But I am sure you weren't losing sleep over my unannounced absence except for maybe guitarsophist. (Maybe we should be Facebook friends so you know I am alive.)
Anyway, some of you know from my Facebook status that I left Seattle for good. My life in Seattle was stressful, enlightening, educational, fun, and eye-opening. First of all, the study of ethnomusicology is really cool. (For those of you who are just tuning in my life, I enrolled in the ethnomusicology graduate program at University of Washington with the intent of getting a Ph.D.) I learned a lot and if you are interested in world music and academia sandwiched in one, I highly recommend you look into it. However, I decided to leave the program because I realized I wasn't on the path to living the life of my dreams. When I imagine my dream life, I am on stage performing. I am not reading and writing and trying get published. This realization was spurred on by meeting a hot musician who was living the life of his dreams performing all over the world. And I was like, why am I not doing that? It hit me like a ton of bricks. (Also, I was inspired by a graffiti scribbled on a bathroom door that said, "I aimed for the moon and returned with a pocket full of stars" or something like that.) So, a couple of weeks later I told the head of the department that I was leaving the program to pursue a performing career. She was surprised but gave me her blessing and said I could come back to the program if I so desired in the future. I said thanks, packed my bags and left.
So, how am I going to go about having a performing career, you may wonder especially if you are one of my hundreds of musician friends. Well, I wondered that, too. But I have been brainstorming for about three weeks now and here is what I have. The music I am going to make will be a fusion of pop, classical, and Korean traditional music. Still not sure what market segment I want to target but I decided to let that take care of itself by exposing it on the Internet. So, here is the plan: Write a song fusing all those elements, find musicians to collaborate with, make a recording and a music video. Enlist the help of my friends on Facebook (and that would be you, my dears) to make it go viral online. Link the music video to the Kickstarter fundraiser and raise enough money for a whole album and a concert. My goal is to have the music video circulate and go viral online by the end of the year. Which means it has to be good. Really good. And I am confident that it's going to be good. :)
I also have another project that some of you know about. It's an opera about the story of my
grandmother told from my perspective as a Korean-American that I've been wanting to write for a long time. I found a composer and a historian/ethnomusicologist to collaborate with. I also have a conceptual artist in mind who might be interested in doing multi-media stage work. So, I will be doing a lot of research and interviewing my family members over the summer to write the libretto for this work. I am really excited about it. There is a lot that needs to be done for this project like finding funding but if the work is good, we may be able to get the Korean government behind it.
The sad tale of a starving artist is that even with all these grand plans, I still need to have a day job. So, I am planning on applying to community colleges to teach piano, voice, and/or music history and start a piano/voice studio.
So, that's the plan. And I am really excited about it!
