hankyoreh

Lavinia Meijer

The song “Arirang” is an umbilical cord of sorts for Korean culture. It is a simple song, featuring the repeated words, “Arirang, arirang, arariyo” – yet it has the power to bring together Koreans anywhere in the world. World-renowned harpist Lavinia Meijer, 35, was similarly drawn to “Arirang.”

Born in Korea, she was adopted in the Netherlands along with her older brother at the age of two. After encountering “Arirang” during her first-ever visit to South Korea for a 2009 performance, she went on to create and performer her own variations. Imbued with varied emotions of suffering and hope, “Arirang” lent itself to variations that emphasized darker, lighter, and more subtle feelings.

Meijer, who recently released a single version of “Arirang,” shared her variations on the tune during the PyeongChang Winter Music Festival, which opened on Jan. 30. The cool and delicate sounds of the harp strings brought forth a deep sense of the song’s lyricism.

“‘Arirang’ is the song that helped me commune with Korea,” said Meijer on Feb. 6 at the Sony Music office in Seoul’s Gangnam neighborhood.

“Every time I play ‘Arirang,’ I think back to the first connection of my life. I suppose I’ve been influenced by things like my adoption and meeting my biological father when I first came to South Korea,” she said. “People who heard the performance told me, ‘It’s like you saw into the soul.’”

who recently released a single version of “Arirang

Meijer began studying the harp at age nine. She chose the instrument because she wanted to play something as distinctive as she looked. She turned out to have a gift for it, taking top honors at the 1997 Nederlands Harp Concours and 2000 International Harp Competition in Brussels and winning the 2009 Dutch Music Prize.

The richness of her music stems from a unique background. She and her brother were adopted from South Korea by a Dutch social worker father and Austrian accountant mother after they had given birth to their first daughter. The couple subsequently adopted another child, a boy from Ethiopia who was two years younger.

“Our family is a bit special,” Meijer said with a laugh. “My ‘foreignness’ has helped in making music. There’s a Dutch me and a Korean me, so I get a rich variety of feelings.”

Meijer also performed Yun I-sang “Duo for Cello and Harp” at the PyeongChang Winter Music Festival. She felt especially drawn to Yun’s work, which involves performance techniques in which Western instruments produce sounds reminiscent of the Korean traditional string instruments like the gayageum and geomungo. Meijer, who has played Yun’s work for her degree and in regular performances, described him as a “composer who created excellent works for the harp.”