My World: Jung Jae-il

You may not know the man but you will have heard his music. After the triumph of Parasite at the Oscars in 2020 and the release of Netflix’s all-conquering Squid Game in 2021 the work of South Korean composer Jung Jae-il, who scored both, was practically unavoidable. Such ubiquity is unusual in a musician who counts ancient Korean court music, Balkan brass and thrash metal among his influences. He has deployed all these styles and more in compositions for stage, screen and the pop charts. He even composed and performed for the historic 2018 summit between North and South Korea, making him one of a few who can count Kim Jong Un among their audience. How did a self-taught musician from a non-musical family reach the pinnacle of his profession?

“Listening was the greatest study,” explains Jae-il. Ironically it was while he was studying at cram school (top-up classes) that he was distracted by a formative listening experience. Metallica’s Black Album came out when Jae-il was nine years old and he was instantly inspired to play metal guitar. He soon formed his first band by advertising in a magazine for fellow thrash enthusiasts. Jae-il explains that he still uses heavy metal guitar chord voicings in his piano playing and orchestrations; “some pianists might find these cacophonous, but I don’t think so.” The public response to the Squid Game score, for which Metallica’s Master of Puppets was a key reference, would suggest Jae-il is right.

During a brief spell at Seoul Jazz Academy in 1995 a professor persuaded him to swap metal guitar for jazz bass. Jae-il overcame his initial misgivings upon hearing Sly and the Family Stone, and his subsequent flair for funk saw him recruited to join professional funk group GIGS while still a teenager. Jae-il’s musical curiosity was soon piqued by a different style, however. Hearing Massive Attack’s Mezzanine upon its release in 1998 led him to the Bristol trip-hop scene and from there onto Björk and Brian Eno. This brooding electro influence has persisted in his scoring. He finds the space created by ambient electronica particularly useful for theatre work. “Compared to films the music should be further away because the audience needs to listen to the lines,” Jae-il explains, demonstrating his sensitivity to music’s function in the hierarchy of a broader work.

When it came to composing for the 2018 Inter-Korean Summit Jae-il elected to meld Korean and Western styles in a euphoric fusion. This was a moment of enormous delicacy and potential significance in the peninsula’s peace process, which saw a North Korean leader visit the South for the first time since 1953. Jae-il recalls: “At the time I really believed that peace was coming. Now it’s far.” He is optimistic about what music can achieve in dialogue with politics, highlighting his recent work psalms, which commemorates the 40th anniversary of the 1980 Gwangju democratic uprising. Like film, politics is a medium where music can evoke or enhance emotion, though Jae-il wryly observes that politicians can often be less demanding than filmmakers: “directors are picky.”

The prospect of Korean unification may have receded but South Korea’s 'K-Wave' continues to rise up the global cultural agenda. I ask Jae-il whether he is happy for his work to be viewed as part of a broader vogue for Korean culture. He acknowledges that “I have seized a lot of opportunities thanks to the K-Wave, I feel extremely grateful.” He highlights the upcoming concert with the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) as one such opportunity. Jae-il will lead the esteemed orchestra through his hit compositions, with Squid Game and Parasite taking pride of place. Jae-il deployed an ersatz baroque style on the Parasite score that provided a perfect companion to the empty decadence of the upper-class characters and the tragi-comic antics of the lower class. There is something of Parasite’s insider/outsider dynamic in Jae-il – a self-taught musician who could not afford to go to music college – wielding the baton over the LSO’s conservatoire crowd. “I am a pseudo-classical musician,” suggests Jae-il. “I was self-taught and I just mimic.” Rather than mimicry, it is modesty that characterises Jae-il. An unusual musical journey has given him the humility to allow his art to serve the broader project rather than itself, and his atypical training has infused his compositions with the oddities that make them so compelling.

An extended version of this interview with Jung Jae-il will feature in our November 2023 (#192) issue (on sale from October 6)

Jung Jae-il will perform with the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican on October 1 (details here). It is the opening night of the K-Music Festival (October 1 - November 12). See the festival's full line-up at serious.org.uk/events/series/k-music-2023