Drum roll please: Korean group strikes up the band
It took a little persuasion for Moowon Lee to take a shot at Korean percussion. As a freshman at Syracuse University, Lee heard about the Korean drumming club Cheon Ji In. But he felt intimidated about joining the group. Then he met Clay Strange, his neighbor who looked like he’d be just as out of a place in a Korean drumming club as Lee.
That’s when the current Cheon Ji In president, who had only heard of the music when he arrived at Syracuse, decided he wanted to get involved.
‘(Strange) started asking me in Korean to join Cheon Ji In,’ Lee said. ‘It was a huge shock to me; to hear a non-Korean speaking Korean, telling me to join the group. I thought if this is something worth non-Koreans to join, then maybe it would be an honor for me to join as a Korean.’
Four years later Lee, a senior economics major, will lead the Cheon Ji In club’s sixth annual performance this Saturday at 7 p.m. in the Goldstein Auditorium in Schine.
‘We try to fuse together our modern-day drumming with traditional Korean drumming,’ said Isabelle Tan, a senior information studies major.
Cheon Ji In’s approximately 35 members use five different types of Korean drums to play traditional music from the villages of Korea. Part of the performance, called nanja, encourages the audience to join the members on stage playing the instruments.
‘It’s not American traditional drumming,’ said Tim Evans, a sophomore computer engineering major and co-director of publicity for the group. ‘It’s much more complicated than what you would think; it can be very interesting and oddly very calming even though it’s very loud.’
Last year approximately 500 students and Syracuse residents attended the performance, Lee said. This year, the group hopes for more because the performance falls on a Korean holiday – the Independence Movement Day. Lee hopes Koreans and non-Koreans alike can celebrate together the day Koreans fought for liberation from Japanese colonialism.
‘The Syracuse area has a large population of Korean people and a lot of families that adopt Korean children,’ Lee said. ‘We invite all those people, people who miss their country and culture. They get to hear us and get a chance to remember their culture and their families.’ Two married Korean SU graduate students started the Cheon Ji In club in 1997 after noticing a rise in popularity of Korean drumming across college campuses – and yet a division among Koreans.
‘There was a separate group of Koreans who just came from Korea and a separate group of Korean Americans who grew up in America and others who moved from Korea halfway through their childhood,’ Lee said, remembering what a Cheon Ji In alumnus told him. ‘The alumnus told me it was sad seeing them hanging out separately.’
The club’s organizers hoped Cheon Ji In would help unite all Koreans at Syracuse and non-Koreans as well.
‘Even though their backgrounds are different and have a different history, they still come to enjoy Korean drumming,’ Lee said. ‘Playing together helps build good relationships among Koreans.’
One of the group’s original goals was to have at least one non-Korean. Now half the group’s members come from an ethnicity other than Korean.
The performance on Saturday is one more step to uniting the Koreans on campus and celebrating their culture with the rest of the community.
‘Our goal is to make people realize what the Korean community takes part in on this campus, and that it actually exists.’ Evans said.
