Sorry for not writing. For a year and a half. I blame my utter disappointment in my sports teams for the writers’ block.

I am on the other side of the world in Seoul, expectedly jetlagged and sleep-deprived but with a truly content stomach that has been fed my favorite cuisine in the world for a few days. It isn’t impossible to find a bad restaurant here but it is seemingly difficult. While even in New York I hesitate to try an unrecommended restaurant (especially at risk of dropping $50 on a completely disappointing meal), I feel safe walking into any old place on the street here. Even the pre-packaged breakfast on the train hit the spot. Almost every time I pack to come to Korea I wonder why I am putting my body through this traumatic experience. And every time it takes me one meal with friends to remember why I previously agreed to make this trip!

I am playing a concert here in Seoul tonight with my piano quartet-ish ensemble M.I.K. Don’t ask me what the acronym stands for – the party line is that it’s just a name. And if you do your google research and find something that you think it might be, please remember that it was our management who came up with it. MIK has convened about once a year for five years with the intention (and some success) of bringing a passion of playing and experiencing chamber music to the younger generation of Korean students and audience members. This also includes introducing them to newer works; our first CD was of four commissioned pieces of young Korean and Korean-American composers. The other guys in the group are like rock stars in the Korean classical music scene, a world that is even more tightly-knit than in the US because of the size of the country. One member has already starred in a mainstream film, one is a radio host personality and model, and one is among the most prominent professors in the country. I feel like a tag-along. Meanwhile it is a fun ride because the concert atmosphere is so vibrant and charged by the youthfulness of the audiences. The average concert-goer’s age here must be about 1/3 of that in the US, and they are overwhelmingly female. They make a lot more noise here after the piece is done! Interestingly they also make less noise while the music is being played.

Western classical music wasn’t regularly performed here until a little more than 50 years ago, so in that way the music is also young. The Schumann piano quartet that we are playing tonight hasn’t been experienced by the audiences here for 150 years. Perhaps that is also why the pop and classical worlds seem to be (still) interconnected. Much as I’d love for Christina Aguilera to come to my concert and then come out afterwards and sing for a group of friends at a fancy karaoke bar, it is beyond the realm of possibility in New York. Here in Seoul pop singers and actors/actresses are old childhood friends of their classical music counterparts. This adds a bit of a glam factor to the concerts and it certainly doesn’t hurt audience-building.

MIK rehearsals reflect this co-existence of various musical styles. There is, of course, the repertoire that we will perform – from Schumann and Beethoven to Francaix, Murray Schafer, and the aforementioned Korean composers such as James Ra and the noted new-age Yiruma. But these rehearsals are often interrupted by inspired outbursts of tango, K-pop, horrible jazzy versions of Bach, and concerto performances with completely improvised 3-man orchestral reductions. I go from here to playing with Mitsuko Uchida at the Concertgebouw in a couple of weeks. She would probably wince to hear these rehearsals! But there is something wonderfully refreshing about it, reminding me that classical music should not be isolated from the other musical styles of our time. It is all music. Mozart WOULD have rapped, on a level that only Jay-Z could match. Can you imagine the lyrics he would have come up with? They probably would have been unfit for Howard Stern.