Where music meets the living earth.

The Ecomusician Ambassador Retreat at Jeoji Oreum was designed as both an environmental action day and a planning retreat for the student leadership team. Away from rehearsal rooms and concert halls, the ambassadors spent time in one of Jeju's natural landscapes to reconnect the project's musical work with the environment that inspires it.

Songe d'Azur is a composition inspired by my study of French late-Romantic and Impressionist music, particularly after performing and analysing works by Claude Debussy and Édouard Lalo. Through this piece, I became fascinated by the French approach to musical colour, where expressive markings, delicate textures, and harmonic ambiguity create atmosphere and sensitivity rather than a direct musical narrative.

For three months, six of our ambassadors worked on something that started as a strange idea and slowly became one of the projects we are most proud of. Together with OSEAN, a marine conservation NGO based in Tongyeong, we set out to make the relationship between music and the ocean visible in the most literal way we could think of.

The Student Composition Live Recording Session gave young composers the opportunity to bring their original works from the page into a professional-style performance setting. The session focused not only on recording the music itself, but on the full creative process of composing, rehearsing, interpreting, and refining a new piece collaboratively with performers.

Long Time is a melodic composition inspired by a quiet moment beside the Jeju sea after a difficult day. The piece begins with the image of a single person lying by the ocean, softly humming a simple melody into the silence. At first, the music feels intimate and fragile, as if the melody is only a private thought. Gradually, however, the surrounding natural world begins to respond. The motion of the waves, the distant wind, and the breathing rhythm of the shoreline seem to enter the music one by one, transforming the solo line into a wider musical landscape.

Before the first note sounded, two Ecomusician ambassadors stepped onto the stage not to perform, but to speak. Jiho and Jiwon opened the school band production with a short, honest lecture about something audiences rarely consider: the hidden environmental cost of the technology that makes a concert feel like a concert.

Developing from Tidal Echoes, the Haenyeo Song enters a new stage as its recorded material moves into the editing and mixing process. This phase focuses on shaping the captured sounds — balancing the natural resonance of the cello with the textures of field recordings and environmental elements drawn from the Jeju coastline — into a finished work. The process reflects Ecomusician's broader aim of letting the natural world speak through music, refining each layer so that breath, tide, and the voices of the haenyeo remain present within the final composition.

Some of our best moments as a collective haven't happened on stage. They've happened on a beach, with our families beside us, picking up someone else's waste and talking about what this whole project is really for.

Suspended Time is a slow and melancholic original composition inspired by the ocean's quiet beauty and its fragile state under marine pollution. Through delicate melodies and a reflective atmosphere, the piece captures both the calmness of the sea and the sadness of watching it slowly disappear.

Echoes Beneath the Waves was an experimental cello recital built around a simple question: could an environmental message be expressed not only through the music performed, but through the way the entire concert was produced? Rather than presenting sustainability as a theme added onto a conventional recital, the event treated every part of the performance—from repertoire and stage design to printed materials and audience experience—as part of the same environmental statement.

The GEC First Eco Concert Launch Festival marked the beginning of Ecomusician's public programme at NLCS Jeju, bringing together young musicians and students through a shared interest in music and environmental responsibility. Ecomusician ambassadors Sehyun and Jiho represented the initiative, helping introduce its aim of using performance as a way to encourage greater awareness of ecological issues.

As part of Arts Week 2026 at NLCS Jeju, Ecomusician presented a live concert featuring a curated selection of original environmental compositions written by students. Selected works were developed from individual interpretations of nature, ecological change, sustainability, and the relationship between people and the environments around them.

A piano and cello duet whose motifs are drawn from the rhythms of Jeju's ocean waves — a musical elegy for the suffering sea, plagued by plastic pollution and rising global temperatures.

A meeting with local haenyeo — the sea diver women of Jeju — whose centuries-old relationship with the ocean inspired this composition. Their practice of diving without breathing apparatus, gathering from the sea with patience and respect, shaped the work's reflection on breath, tide, and our bond with the marine world.

An original composition written during Year 11 for a trio of violin, viola, and piano. I composed this piece while imagining the sea at night. I wanted to capture the quiet, mysterious atmosphere of dark water under moonlight, where stillness and movement seem to exist together. Through the waltz-like rhythm, lyrical melodies, and shifting textures, I tried to create a sense of gentle motion, as if moonlight were slowly moving across the surface of the sea. One of my main focuses in this piece was the juxtaposition between darkness and light. Rather than portraying the ocean as only peaceful or beautiful, I wanted the music to feel more layered, calm but slightly distant, elegant but also shadowed. The piece reflects the beauty of nature, but also its depth, silence, and mystery.

This composition reflects Jeju's deep relationship with the sea through melodies inspired by local work songs and the spirit of haenyeo culture. By evoking dawn, waves, labour, and the pride of "daughters of the sea," the piece encourages marine environmental awareness, reminding listeners that Jeju's ocean is not only a natural landscape, but a living heritage that must be protected.