Profile: Jocelyn Clark, PhD 2005

Jocelyn Clark grew up in Juneau, Alaska. After graduating from high school, Clark spent a year in Japan where she started studying the koto with the Sawai Koto Academy at Wesleyan University. From 1990 to 1991 she studied calligraphy and zheng at the Nanjing Academy for the Arts in China. After graduating from Wesleyan with an honors thesis on the zheng and the Kellam Prize for East Asian Studies, from 1992 to 1995 she received two scholarships (including a summer travel/ research grant from the Korean Institute) to study traditional Korean music majoring in kayagûm performance at the National Classical Music Institute in Seoul, Korea. Though she studied court music for about six months, her main focus was on sanjo as well as pyôngch’ang, which she decided to turn into her dissertation topic. In 1999 she won a Fulbright Fellowship, and in 2000, a Seonam Foundation Fellowship to research the topic in Seoul where she lived and studied with Human Intangible Cultural Asset Kang Jeongsuk.

Jocelyn’s dissertation explored kayagûm pyôngch’ang in relation to three fields: Modern Korean History (under Carter Eckert), Ethnomusicology (under Kay Kaufman Shelemay), and Premodern Korean Literature (under David McCann) and became the first full-length work on the topic in any language. In reviewing the history of the p’ansori texts, Jocelyn’s dissertation focuses primarily on the contributions of the nineteenth century petty bureaucrat and p’ansori aficionado, Shin Jaehyo, concluding that while singers learned Shin’s new sinicized versions and traded them amongst themselves in order to raise their social status and gain upper class patronage, they did so primarily orally, which left room for misunderstandings by those who did not have a classical Chinese education. The songs performed today thus feature a mixture of what might have been a Korean oral-formulaic tradition mixed with a Sino-Korean/Chinese classical literary formulaic tradition, all of which are now memorized for performance. The final three hundred pages of the dissertation features translations of selections from the author’s kayagûm p’yôngch’ang repertoire, featuring songs from two p’ansori narratives and several short dan-ga.

Since graduation, Jocelyn has been working as a musician and director. While a PhD candidate at Harvard University in the department of East Asian Languages and Civilization, she produced a number of concerts featuring both traditional and modern compositions for East Asian instruments. The concert she produced for the celebration of the opening of the Asia Center called "Encounters," featuring two world premieres for the combination of Japanese koto, Chinese zheng, Korean kayagûm, and Korean changgu, became the seed for her ensemble IIIZ+ with the same instrumentation (iiiz.jocelynclark.com) in 2001. IIIZ+ plays traditional and new music commissioned for the group and has performed in NYC, Philadelphia, Boston (thanks to producer Maia Henderson), Washington DC, Connecticut, Kentucky, Antwerp Belgium, Utrecht The Netherlands, Grenoble and Paris France as well as Darmstadt, Nürnberg, and Berlin Germany where it won honorable mention at the Werkstatt der Kulturen’s Musica Vitale festival. Currently IIIZ+ is finishing a Meet the Composer grant with composer Fred Ho, and putting together their first CD in collaboration with the string quartet UnitedBerlin. Jocelyn also works as the Executive Director of a festival of new music in Alaska called CrossSound (CrossSound.com), which she founded with German composer Stefan Hakenberg in 1999. CrossSound pairs East Asian and western soloists with Alaskan musicians of any musical background (including herself on kayagûm) to play works by composers from all over the world written for the occasion. Their Sept. program features Berlin-based Chinese mouth organ (sheng) soloist Wu Wei, and bassoon soloist Janet Underhill of Boston. Jocelyn also performs with the Wang Changyuan Zheng Art Ensemble of New York and the Sawai Koto Ensemble of New York, and as a soloist. Her next concerts will be in Juneau and Sitka, Alaska, and then Dresden, Germany.