The I in the mirror

Avant-garde poet Yi Sang wrote of “The I in the Mirror”: a self in another world, difficult to embrace. It is a self that we can only meet through mediation, through an attempt to cross an uncrossable boundary.
Bringing together performers and composers whose practices move between contemporary creation and deep engagement with Korean and European musical traditions, The I in the Mirror : Reflection offers a multifaceted view of the past, where unexpected echoes begin to surface across different contexts and times. Stepping across bridges formed by history, new compositions take a contemporary perspective on these heterogeneous traditions, learning through the other, searching for a shared language in which boundaries become more fluid, yet maintain their distinct and powerful qualities.
At the center of the program, a newly commissioned work by Gitbi Kwon combines Korean daegeum bamboo flute and pansori voice with Western instruments and electronics, exploring shifting and transforming identities of sound. Excerpts from Isabella Leonarda's Sonata Duodecima—emerging from seventeenth-century church culture by one of the earliest published women composers—stand alongside Hwacheong, a Buddhist chant of repentance and spiritual reflection from the same period. The virtuosic tradition of daegeum sanjo, rooted in Korean folk and shamanic music, is paired with excerpts from Béla Bartók's Out of Doors. Grégoire Simon's Ballade pour une larme qui ne sera pas reimagines fragments of Italian opera through the lens of pansori and contemporary harmony, while Jared Redmond's Seonhye's Five Dreams draws on Korean Buddhist poetry, the sound of the medieval Korean language, and historical notation practices.
Like a mise en abyme—a reflection within a reflection—the program unfolds as a space of mirrored perception, where sound, text, and atmosphere continually refract one another, approaching in a fragile encounter the impossible gesture imagined by Yi Sang: to meet the I in the mirror.

Program:
Gitbi Kwon - Verbindung der Verbindungen (2026) *
Jared Redmond - Seonhye’s Five Dreams (2023/26) **
Grégoire Simon - Ballade pour une larme qui ne sera pas (2019/26) **
Hwacheong
Daegeum sanjo
Isabella Leonarda - Sonata Duodecima, Op. 16/12 (excerpts)
Béla Bartók - Out of Doors (excerpts)
(* world premiere)
(** premiere of revised version)

Performers:
Yoo Hong - daegeum
Sol-i So - pansori voice & janggu
Grégoire Simon - viola & violin
Jared Redmond - piano

Funded by Initiative Neue Musik (INM) Berlin