Sarang Kim
Sarang Kim
Two Hearts
(2018)
for string quartet
From Sarang Kim
“I had two inspirations to the piece: my newborn baby girl and the Haegeum, Korean two-stringed fiddle. I found out that I would have a baby as I started working on the new piece. My first ultrasound showed me a small heart beating so fast, which made me realize that there are literally, physically two hearts in me. That's how I came up with the title. The process of making the whole structure of the piece came out of my very personal experience. I wanted to write a piece that tells the story of having and nurturing a new life. The first movement describes the fetus and her heart beating sound, irregular and weak yet. The second movement has two parts: fast, relentless figures portraying the journey of the fetus that tries to come out to the real world, and the slow ending which means that she made it. \
About the Korean fiddle, I thought that may be the right instrument to execute irregular, wide vibrato I needed. I myself tried to learn that instrument a few years ago. And it is inherently difficult for the Haegeum to make regular vibrato because of the high string tension; also, the two silk strings are vertically held and the bow is in between. I believed that Haegeum performers have developed such irregular and wide vibrato techniques, called '농현 (Nong-hyun in Korean); performers believe that technique truly creates Korean flavor in Korean traditional musical repertoires. I found myself interested in reinterpreting Nong-hyun and other Korean techniques through string quartet.
Other korean techniques include '추성 (Chu-seong: upward pitch bending to an indefinite pitch)', '퇴성 (Teo-seong: downward pitch bending to an indefinite pitch, idiomatically halfway between a minor third and a major third)', and the frequent alteration of vibrato and non-vibrato. I expected that string quartet would create interesting sounds with those techniques.”