Early Life
She began studies of traditional Korean music in South Korea in 1973, at the age of 16, at her father's recommendation. She received a full scholarship to study at South Korea's first national high school for Korean traditional music (국립국악고등학교), one of 60 students accepted in the first year. There, she learned both court and folk styles of singing, drumming, and bamboo flutes (both vertical and transverse), and selected the geomungo (an ancient fretted bass zither with six silk strings that are plucked with a thin bamboo stick) as her major instrument. Her selection of the instrument was audacious; dating to the fourth century, the geomungo had been favored particularly by male Confucian scholars, and was generally not played by women.
She continued her studies with National Living Treasures from The National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts in Seoul, as well as with Korea's leading ethnomusicologists, eventually earning a B.A. degree in Korean traditional music from Seoul National University in 1980.
Read more about this topic: Kim Jin-Hi
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