Yurack Jung – Service through Music
In Cambodia’s rural areas there are many people much more unfortunate than we can ever think of. Kids don’t get the luxury of a good education, and most of the residents don’t enjoy proper housing or even fresh drinking water which we think is the norm in our first world countries. Because of this, the Red Cross founded a non-profit organization called The Cambodia Project, and you can guess what they do.
For a while, Nahnoom paired up with The Red Cross to help these people in need. Nahnoom (나눔) is Korean for “sharing”, and it is a non-profit organization. Run by young high school musicians, it provides many services to raise money for their projects, such as Benefit Concerts they hold. For a while, they have been focusing to support the people of Cambodia, but this time, because of COVID-19, they chose to support the people affected by COVID, directly and indirectly.
With all the social distancing and shutdowns going on, the benefit concert is going to be held online, through Zoom. It won’t be a live performance, but the video of all of us musicians playing our pieces will be shown. I’m no musician who takes music as seriously as many of the people in Nahnoom, nor my younger brother with his cello. I merely just love music and like to play Piano when I want to relieve some stress. I never took part in this kind of community service, but this was introduced to me by my younger brother, who has been partaking in this service. This time, for my community service, I took part in the 16th Benefit Concert. We were to pick 2 pieces, and record ourselves playing it, and send it by the 25th of July. Then they would mash all of the recordings together into one video, and allow those who purchased the ticket to view it, starting August 8th. This time at least, we will receive 15 hours of community service.
I chose to play 2 pieces; River Flows in You by Yiruma, and Ave Maria by Giulio Caccini. The piece by Yiruma was one of my bucket lists to play on the piano along with Fur Elise. I didn’t get a choice as the accompanist for the second piece. My brother chose it because “it was the easiest on his part” out of all of the pieces he could have chosen. I practiced multiple hours a day, trying to get as close to perfection.
A week away from the submission deadline, I began to play with my brother and start recording. The recording was probably the most stressful part. We had to record ourselves playing, and it took many... MANY tries. At first, I thought it wasn’t going to take a long time. But every time the camera was on, my hands become sweaty and slippery, and I even forgot where the middle C was. It’s called anxiety issues. This was the reason why it took over 15 hours just to record it.
I decided to start with Yiruma’s piece because I thought it would be quicker to get this over with by myself rather than with 2 people. However, that was not the case. I felt nervous and messed up constantly, despite all the practice. My brother, tired of waiting for me to finish recording, started to complain. I would have told him to shut up, but I was also getting fatigued. So we tried to record Ave Maria. Recording with someone else was so much easier than solo since it took away some of my anxiety.
It was all good, but having 2 people playing at the same time resulted in a different problem. For some reason, when I played my part perfectly, he messed up, and vice versa. Nothing could have been done at this point, so we just kept on trying. Eventually, we said “Ok. That’s it. We can’t do more.”, and moved on. I got back into River Flows in You, but the only reason I stopped recording was that the deadline was the next day. I cherry-picked the best ones, and put them together, and sent them off through YouTube video links to the current president of Nahnoom.