SONG Project: Performance as the Practice of Attitude

The SONG Project (Bareun Norae) is a performance-oriented project based on Jeongga (正歌), the classical Korean vocal tradition which comprises Gagok, Gasa, and Sijo. At the heart of this tradition lies the pungnyubang, which is a salon of pungnyu and stands for refined artistic leisure. In these salons, scholars and artists composed poetry, performed music, and set sijo verses to melody, thus cultivating an attitude toward life through this practice. Jeong (正) was not a standard already achieved, but a way of living with sound, company, and time. This attitude was not a fixed technique. It was formed through the sustained, everyday practice of listening and creating together. The SONG Project aims to carry forward the spirit of the pungnyubang, understood as the practice of an attitude toward refinement, into the language of the present.

Refinement, as this project understands it, is not a fixed answer but a continuing inquiry — an act of curiosity — asking what a refined practice consists of, testing that question through performance, and redefining the music's position within the spaces it enters. Yet refinement is not reached alone. Differing experiences, brought together in one space, are shaped through relationship with one another. This shaping asks each person present to become a maker, not only a listener — and that step, from listening to offering something of oneself, is itself an act of courage. Since November 2025, the SONG Project has been performed in several settings. Among these, this presentation looks at three cases — the Seoul National University Museum, the Solol Museum in Gangneung, and Jingwansa Temple — and introduces the upcoming SONG Project: LIGHT, to be presented this October at the National Theater of Korea. This was not merely a change of venue. It was an attempt to bring back to life, within today's spaces, an attitude that the pungnyubang originally held: the absence of boundaries between maker and listener, between sound and person.

This flow extends further into its next stage. Through active blocking and the shifting distance and proximity of sound, it creates moments in which even the boundary between stage and audience begins to blur. Like light reflected on a river, SONG Project: LIGHT seeks to hold this attitude of boundarylessness on stage as a brief, shimmering moment that seeps into our lives and then fades. This presentation introduces these intentions and reviews the performances to date, exploring the possibility of this project as a movement cultivating an attitude toward life through song, beyond the boundaries of Jeongga as a genre and of the concert hall itself. As the project expands internationally, this presentation asks anew how the refined song might be practiced within each country's own culture and space: what does it mean to create something refined, here and now?