Doctoral music student obtains national recognition

From Korea to Los Angeles to Bloomington, Jacobs School of Music doctoral student Elliott Bark has been racking up credentials as an up-and-coming composer.

Bark has received several national awards and has even been commissioned by the New York Youth Symphony to compose a concerto eventually performed in Carnegie Hall.

“It’s really amazing, you know — I never expected my music to be performed at Carnegie,” Bark said. “I think it’s everyone’s dream. I was really lucky.”

Bark began his musical career while in the Korean Navy from 2001 to 2003, playing piano for military-related ceremonies such as weddings and dinner parties. He also conducted a church choir and received his first award for a church music composition for a piece written for choir and organ.

In 2003, Bark decided to join his parents, who had recently moved to L.A.

“I was planning to come to the States for my master’s degree, but then I thought, ‘I need to get here as soon as possible,’” Bark said.

While in L.A., Bark gave piano lessons and took English classes at a local community college. Within two years, he made the decision to relocate to Bloomington to attend the Jacobs School of Music for composition.

“I always lived in a big city — Busan (Korea) was a big city, then L.A. was a big city — and when I came here I fell in love with the nature,” Bark said. “I am just walking around the campus and I just felt, ‘Wow, I want to be here.’”

The natural environment surrounding the IU campus has provided inspiration for several of Bark’s nationally renowned compositions, including the piece “Winter Sketches,” which caught the eye of the New York Youth Symphony, and “Autumn Leaves Canvas,” which recently won the Bowdoin International Music Festival Student Composition Competition.

“In L.A. you always see palm trees, and they don’t really change colors, so it’s not really fun to see them,” Bark said. “But in Bloomington in winter they always change colors, and I was just fascinated by that.”

“Autumn Leaves Canvas” is written for solo harp, an instrument that Bark himself does not play. Joy Yeh, another Jacobs doctoral student, helped with the process of composition by playing his piece for him and suggesting stylistic changes.

“That is another great part of IU — we have so many performers,” Bark said. “Composers can go to performers and ask if they can help, and sometimes they are inspiration, sometimes more than anything else.”

Bark’s creativity in this piece can be seen in multiple forms, including the use of wordplay in the title, which can be read as three nouns, depicting fall leaves on a canvas, or as a sentence indicating fall leaving a canvas and the arrival of winter.

“I used a lot of different techniques to express a lot of different colors in autumn,” Bark said. “I also thought about when autumn leaves and when winter comes, so at the end in all the chaotic moments I used (Silent Night), just very briefly quoting the melody, kind of suggesting that winter is coming, but in a very veiled way.”

Another display of creative expression was Bark’s decision to replace standard program notes with a poem. His composition, “Shalom,” was commissioned by the New York Youth Symphony and was performed in May 2009 at Carnegie Hall.

“Instead of explaining what I had done, because I believe that music should explain itself, I just decided to write program notes kind of like a movie trailer,” Bark said. “I just wrote a poem.”

The tone of various portions of the poem is supposed to represent the emotion of various movements within the composition, beginning with a harsh overtone and ending in prayer, he said.

After graduating from IU, Bark plans on furthering his career as a conductor while still writing his own compositions.

“I’m a composer but I do conducting a lot, so what I want to do is go to bigger cities like New York and conduct music there and write music,” Bark said. “Less teaching and more performance. I don’t feel like I’m ready to start teaching yet. I want to learn more.”