CelloGayageum

CelloGayageum plays the Asia Society Texas Center on Friday, November 13, at 7:30 PM. It's a duo that pairs a Western cello with the Korean gayageum, the twelve-string zither at the heart of Korea's traditional gug-ak. The two musicians are Daniel Kim, a cellist from Austria, and Dayoung Yoon, a gayageum player from Korea.

They write their own music for the pairing, building from Korean folk melodies and shaping it through their classical training. It's a combination that doesn't come from a standard repertoire; they're composing the material themselves, so what you'll hear is their own work rather than a set of established classics. The folk melodies provide the starting point, and their classical backgrounds determine how those melodies are developed and arranged for the two instruments.

The duo formed in Berlin in 2016, and they've spent a decade working with this particular pairing. They describe it as a combination that shouldn't work on paper but does on stage—the deep, sustained voice of the cello alongside the plucked, resonant tones of the gayageum. That's the whole point of the project: taking two instruments from very different traditions and finding a way to make them sound right together.

Tickets start at $29, and members get welcome savings and never pay booking fees. The concert is on Friday, November 13, at 7:30 PM at the Asia Society Texas Center.