Brandeis is hosting a unique opportunity for students and faculty alike to enjoy a special mélange of both Eastern and Western influences in music. The Pacific Rim Festival, which started yesterday and continues today, will be taking place in Slosberg Recital Hall. JustArts had an opportunity to interview Prof. Judith Eissenberg (MUS) by e-mail about the festival.JustArts:What exactly is the Pacific Rim Festival? Is it a celebration of culture? A social statement?

Judith Eissenberg: The Pacific Rim refers to countries and cities located on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. The festival was founded in 1996 to celebrate and explore the rich variety of musical cultures of the world; this year's festival features over thirty composers from both sides of the Pacific. A special feature of the Festival, whose motto is "Music from the Past, Music for the Future" is the presentation of world premiere compositions from the Cultural Synthesis Project, written especially for the combination of western and traditional Asian musical instruments. Your instinct to ask if the PR festival is a social statement is right on-Artistic Director and composer Hi Kyung Kim [said]: "We hope to gain a deeper understanding of the music and the people of our nations. Through music we celebrate the common bond of our humanity."

This week (beginning in Santa Cruz, [Calif.] and heading toward the two concerts at Brandeis on Monday and Tuesday nights at 7 has been an incredible experience. All of us in this project realize that the music that we performed was necessarily new-that in order meet each other, violin and daegum, cello and gayagum-we needed to play music that was somehow OF and at the same time NEW to each of our traditions. We learned from and were inspired by each other, and helped each other through the journey of each piece. One of the composers, when confronted with composing music that adapted stylizations of traditional Korean repertoire or the vernacular of Western contemporary music, decided to create a fictitious folk tradition, from the mythical island of N'Shima. The music he wrote came from this new imagined place.

JA: What types of instruments are going to be played?

JE: The Western ones will be violin, viola, cello and clarinet. The traditional Korean instruments will be daegum (long bamboo flute), haegum (two string violin), agaeng (giant zither, bowed with a stick), and gayageum, (zither). The Korean performers are revered soloists making up the Contemporary Music Ensemble Korea.

JA: Can you tell us a little more about the specific groups collaborating on this project?

JE: There are three groups that are coming to Brandeis:

CMEK (Contemporary Music Ensemble Korea) is renowned as one of the most innovative ensembles in the world, on the forefront of new music creation in Korea and abroad. The four members who will be at Brandeis are Sang-Hun Kim, ajaeng; Soo-Neon Chung, haegum; Jeong-Seung Kim, daegum; and Jiyoung Yi, gayageum. CMEK was founded in 1998 with the aim to construct a new kind of music-one that goes beyond a distinction between Western and Korean music-and promote it in the world as part of a universal musical language.

The Lydian String Quartet . has been on the faculty for 30 years. In that time, we have championed the new, explored the traditional, and recently have been on a musical journey with our project "Around the World in a String Quartet." This festival has opened up our ears and imaginations to new possibilities, and we have had the great pleasure of working with our colleagues from the Pacific Korea. As part of the festival, another ensemble as well is taking part, the Del Sol String Quartet from San Francisco, known for their adventurous programming. Together, the musicians from these groups are performing stunning new compositions, most of them world premieres. Included are works from Brandeis faculty composers Yu Hui Chang and [Prof.] David Rakowski (MUS), Brandeis graduate Laurie San Martin '03, and Brandeis Ph.D. candidate Seunghee Lee.

JA: Why these two types of music? Is there some sort of special thing going on that can't be achieved with other types of musical collaborations?

JE: One of the hardest things I am asked to do is to talk about music. I can tell you that to me, these two musics concentrate on different aspects of sound, . one (the music from my own Western European tradition) seems concerned with harmony, hierarchies of structure and materials, . the other with what happens with the sound of a single note after it is first presented. Before playing with these musicians I never considered that so many potentialities existed. How do these two perspectives interact? What is the chemistry of the music that results when these aesthetic values meet? Are these things in fact more than aesthetic viewpoints in music? . Could they reflect cultural perspectives, or even represent world views?

If it is this last, I can't help wondering more about the composer's mythical land of N'Shima. N'Shima was imagined to create a soundscape where the two musics can meet on equal footing, both adventurers in a newborn world. Here, dissonance offers possibility and we treasure difference. There is a lesson in that.