Hanpuri - Korean Ritual for the noble 7 women of Yeoksa prison, room no.8 -

The work was composed to honor the noble spirit of the seven women who were imprisoned during the Japanese occupation of Korea in Cell No. 8 of the women’s prison (Yeoksa Prison). Despite their confinement, they wrote their own texts and resisted the Japanese regime until the very end.
The piece consists of two parts. The first part is inspired by the Korean shamanic ritual gut, one of the most distinctive traditional ceremonies deeply rooted in shamanism. This ritual serves to summon the souls of the deceased and to release their unresolved grievances, performed by a shaman accompanied by a drummer using traditional percussion instruments. Accordingly, the work features both a soprano and a percussion solo, focusing less on sung text and more on ritualistic sound gestures and shamanistic modes of expression.
In the second part, the summoned spirits appear through historical texts written by the independence activists themselves, here transformed into melodic lines. The work stands as a musical commemoration of their courage, dignity, and unwavering resistance - an appeal for their exalted spirit to endure in the collective memory of our people.