Okkyung
Lee

Her music is absolute; unreserved and urgent. Whether you experience Okkyung Lee as a solo performer, in improvisational exchange with others, as a composer for contemporary music ensembles, as a sonic architect of site-specific works, or as a creator of playful synth melodies—you can always feel her inquisitive joy in experimentation and a crucial personal expression. “The essence of my music lies in the intensity with which I connect to sound,” she said in a video call a few weeks before she leaves for Berlin.

Born in Daejeon, South Korea, in 1975, she received her first cello lessons at the age of six and learned the instrument’s classical repertoire: the Bach suites, the Dvořák and Elgar concertos. But she didn’t play the cello passionately back then, says Lee, since her training was too uniform, and the career prospects for a young musician in 1990s Korea were hardly promising. So she went to the USA to study, first at Berklee College of Music (film music and composition), then at the New England Conservatory of Music (contemporary improvisation).

During those years, Okkyung Lee discovered free improvisation, an approach to making music that allowed her a hitherto unknown freedom of expression. After moving from Boston to New York, she joined the local scene and very soon became an internationally sought-after improviser and collaborator. While this facet of her artistic practice has been somewhat sidelined in recent years, she’d like to use her DAAD stay in Berlin to improvise with musicians in various constellations again, to listen to others and put her own habits and principles to the test.

“Noise + others”—this is how Okkyung Lee describes the work. Here, the term noise doesn’t refer to the specific music genre (whose penchant for repurposed sounds and occasionally extreme volumes she’s also fond of), but to the force with which noise goes deeper the surface of sounds. If you concentrate on just one thing for a long time, persistently digging deeper and deeper, then ideally something very personal will emerge, says Lee. She thus also speaks of a highly romantic gesture. Her approach to composition is similar: each work is the distilled essence of an intensive engagement with a very specific theme—as for example in Cheol-Kkot-Sae (premiered in 2016 at the Donaueschinger Musiktage), for which she studied the Korean tradition of Pansori in depth. In a more recent commission for the Explore Ensemble (titled Signals, which premiered in 2024 at the Transit Festival), she pursued the musical qualities of signals. That same year, she created her first work for cello and electronics as a composer-performer, namely byeol for the Présences Festival of the Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM). In Berlin, Okkyung Lee will pursue further compositional ideas—for example, for string orchestra or female choir. But maybe she’ll also finally found the rock band she sometimes dreams of: “I want to do it all!” she says with a laugh. Absolutely.