About

Joogwang Lim (b.1992) is a Boston-based Korean composer. His main musical features can be summarized as a fusion between music and other ideas, such as myths, stories, plays, religious texts, ideologies, and even scientific theories. Especially, plots extracted from these ideas play an important role in his music. Along with his tendency of composing firm and complex structures from those plots, his music contains full of expressive components, such as texts, symbols, and leitmotifs. He also focuses on the social and cognitive aspects of music. He often challenges the audience’s sense and preconception through musical mockery, unusual space settings, contradicting multimedia projection and theatric elements. On top of that, he continues to reach a wide variety of genres, i.e. choral music to traditional Korean music, to express his diverse cultural, material and spiritual experiences.

His individual works and collaborative works have been featured at many festivals and concerts worldwide, such as ASEAN Youth Ensemble Workshop & PGVIM International Symposium, The 1st SNU International Music Camp, 2018 Korea Chamber Music Composition Festival II, The 2nd Agape International Church Music Composition Competition & Festival, 2018 Audio Trading Market, the 1st Electroacoustic Composers’ Point of View and 2021 N.E.O. Voice Festival. His music has been performed by Seoul Gayageum Ensemble, ASEAN Youth Ensemble, Korean Army Training Center Band, Prime Philharmonic Orchestra, Agape Festival Choir, Ensemble mise-en, Splinter Reeds, Sound Icon, MIVOS Quartet and N.E.O Festival Choir. Masterclasses with David Ludwig, Joyce Koh, Dieter Mack, Johannes Kretz, Peter Eötvös, Younghi Pagh-Paan and Jennifer Walshe also contributed to his musical development.

He earned B.Mus. in composition in 2018 at Seoul National University and M.M. in composition in 2022 at Boston University. He is currently living in Boston, United States, where he pursues his doctoral degree in composition at Boston University under the tutelage of Richard Cornell, Ketty Nez and Joshua Fineberg.

->Bonus: ANTI-BIO, aided by ChatGPT (click to see)

Cited as "the most uninteresting composer" (by his non-musician friends), Joogwang Lim, born in 1992 in South Korea, is known for composing music that demands technical virtuosity from musicians for nothing. In his music, Joogwang Lim opts for dissonance and unconventional chord progressions and challenges the concept of traditional phrasing, creating music that may seem disjointed and unpredictable. Yet he often fails to achieve his initial goals.

Throughout his career, Lim has embraced diverse musical ideas and styles, resulting in compositions lacking a cohesive stylistic thread. His composition led to numerous rejections from various competitions, commissions, and opportunities. Lim's compositions have received only a handful of awards and recognition. He has had limited exposure at festivals, and scholarships and financial support have been scarce. In most cases, Lim's compositions received no reviews at all. Rarely his work left critics and audiences uncertain of how to interpret or categorize it, leading to polarizing responses; even his father scolded him by presenting a game controller in his music. Furthermore, a large volume of his works is yet to be premiered, limiting opportunities for public recognition and performance.

In recent years, Joogwang Lim has faced creative challenges, finding it difficult to produce new compositions due to his laziness under the guise of the so-called “process of stylistic transformation.” After venturing to the United States to pursue further studies and opportunities, Lim encountered additional obstacles as a foreigner and faced uncertainty in finding stable employment within the challenging music industry. Even though he expects to earn a doctoral degree in music and plans to end the twenty-five years of studentship, Joogwang Lim's journey as a professional composer has been far from smooth and stable.