Where 'ah' meets 'a': Haegeum, viola d'amore and the music of vowels

"Ah, ee, oh, oo. Vowels are similar yet subtly different. Some are exactly the same, but others produce sounds that are just slightly alike and yet distinct."

French sound artist Haemi Clemenceau was describing the difference between the Korean and French languages. A fluent Korean speaker with precise pronunciation, she has long been as curious about language as she is about music. When she first began learning Korean, what struck her was not unfamiliar grammar or word order — it was the vowels, sounds that shift into something entirely different the moment the mouth changes shape by the smallest degree.

Strip away the consonants that carry reason and meaning from human language, and what remains cannot convey meaning on its own, yet breathes life and resonance into every word. Three artists have found music in those primordial sounds — the vowels. Haegeum player Kim Ye-ji, viola d'amore player Olivier Marin and sound artist Haemi Clemenceau will share a stage through "Barammaneuro, Moraemaneuro Soriga Naji Anda" ("Sound Does Not Come From Wind or Sand Alone"), a Franco-Korean collaborative project presented as part of Sejong Center for the Performing Arts' contemporary performing arts festival SyncNext26, running July 3-5 at the Sejong S Theater.

The Korean "ah" and the French "a" meet and resonate with each other. Six artists from the two countries share one stage, and the thread connecting them all is the vowel.

Kim, who spoke with reporters at Sejong Center recently, said she found it fascinating that vowels such as "ah," "ee" and "oh" exist in every language, yet the precise shape of the mouth and the range of their use differ subtly from one language to the next.

"In Korean, the word 'uri' carries a concrete sense of space while also meaning 'you and I together as us,' but in French it works quite differently," Kim said.

Bilingual speakers tend to feel the gap between their native tongue and a foreign language more acutely. Clemenceau works in Korea exploring the boundary between installation art and sound, and her linguistic curiosity became a defining force in shaping the performance's direction.

Clemenceau said she had long been drawn to the sounds that emerge when a vowel is held and sustained. "It is a linguistic element, but it can always carry a musical feeling," she said. "I came to think that the sustained sound itself could become a musical backdrop."

That experiment, rooted in language, led toward a genre in which beautiful music is made from vowels alone. "Once I became absorbed in vowels, I couldn't leave out Korean jeongga (Jo Yun-yeong)," Clemenceau said, "and as I searched for a counterpart from another country, I arrived at European medieval chant (Christian Floix)." Jeongga is a genre defined by the long, drawn-out resonance of its vowels — it is sometimes jokingly called the world's longest song because the sounds "ah… ee…" are sung in an unbroken stream. Vowels continue like humming, with no consonants to interrupt them.

True to the Franco-Korean pairing, the program is structured as a symmetrical balance between the two sides. Korean traditional music and French and European instruments and music are placed in parallel. Korea is anchored by jeongga, haegeum and geomungo, while France contributes medieval chant, the period string instrument viola d'amore and electronic sound. Jeongga and medieval chant form a symmetry as vocal genres that each carry the cultural archetype of their respective traditions, while the geomungo serves as the backbone of the jeongga and holds the weight of the ensemble.

The haegeum and geomungo (Shim Eun-yong) share their sound with the viola d'amore, a European period instrument. These instruments gain their texture atop the reverberations produced by the human voice.

"Unlike modern instruments, the viola d'amore has sympathetic strings beneath the playing strings that vibrate during performance and create a rich overtone structure," Marin said. "That resonance mechanism pairs remarkably well with traditional instruments like the Iranian setar or the Korean haegeum."

Clemenceau's electronic sound cuts across East and West, past and present, redrawing the axes of time and space. "If there is a line between France and Korea, I feel another line forming between traditional sound and the electronic textures of the present," she said. "I am trying to find balance within that space."

The process of building the music has been a singular experiment in blending disparate genres and instruments — and through it, the performers say they have encountered moments of liberation.

Kim has freed the haegeum from its traditional role as a purely melodic instrument. The haegeum is the only traditional Korean instrument that uses all eight materials — metal, stone, silk, bamboo, gourd, clay, leather and wood. "I have been finding the natural sounds inherent in those materials by bouncing the bow, scraping with a fingernail and striking the instrument," she said.

Experiments mixing Eastern and Western instruments, or past and present genres, are not new. For many performers, the challenge in such work has been achieving harmony — often at the cost of their own voice. "When I worked with Western instruments before, I would reduce my nonghyeon (vibrato) and suppress the sigimsae (ornamental techniques) so as not to interfere with the timbre of a cello or viola, trying to sound more like a Western instrument," Kim recalled. "But as I performed abroad and looked back, I realized that nonghyeon and other characteristics of Korean music are each performer's individual fingerprint — a unique trembling that no other instrument can imitate."

Kim has turned that distinctiveness into a strength, laying her rough-textured nonghyeon over the deep overtones of the viola d'amore. The two instruments, blending differently from moment to moment, acknowledge their differences and forge a single harmony.

The music moves in an improvisational form, unconfined by a fixed score. Small noises in the hall and the murmur of the audience are embraced as part of the music, generating new sensations — that is the artists' intention. The venue itself is not fixed either. The performance travels from the Sejong S Theater to Suwon Museum of Art and then to the rooftop of Ilmin Museum of Art, taking on new sounds at each location.

At the S Theater, sounds that were always present but never heard — the hum of the air-conditioning, the click of stage lights switching on and off — are deliberately brought to the surface. At Suwon Museum of Art, whose architectural flow evokes the alleyways of the Haenggung-dong neighborhood, the high ceilings are used to create a cathedral-like resonance. On the rooftop of Ilmin Museum of Art, the vast noise of Gwanghwamun is gathered into a single soundscape and used as ambient material.

"I wanted to draw out the sounds of spaces we believed should be silent and offer the audience an acoustic awakening," Kim said. Marin said collecting sounds and noise in every new city is part of his work. "Even when playing Beethoven, asking how it might connect to today's AI is the fate of a contemporary artist," he said. "The noise of a space is a tool that gives strong inspiration to a work."

The performance's title — "Sound Does Not Come From Wind or Sand Alone" — carries its greatest metaphor in the idea of collision with an audience. Sound is born not from one alone, but from two, from a relationship. The three artists describe the work as a "sonic theater" — an open concept of theater that places sound at the core of the narrative and as the protagonist that reshapes space — exploring the very conditions under which such an encounter becomes possible.

"Eyes have eyelids — you can close them if you don't want to see. But ears have no such lid. They are always open. Sound simply washes over you and you receive it as it comes. I hope people will set aside the heavy barrier of thinking something is experimental, and enjoy the sound itself with the lightness of a baby hearing the resonance of vowels in the womb." (Kim Ye-ji)