Volume 8 / Chapter 273
TL: LightNovelCafe
Editor: Isleidir
3 months later, all of Isaac Stern Center’s smaller theaters opened and a lot of programs were held in the center.
Due to the center’s program which did not consider genres, there was a strange mix of rock manias with tattoos on their arms and classical viewers in suits.
Everyone anticipated Jun Hyuk’s performance each night, but there were only 1 or 2 performances in a month.
And only 6 months had shows. The other 6 months were nailed in off-season.
Amelia’s tour only lasted 6 months out of a year as well. Jun Hyuk and Amelia traveled for 6 months and rested.
During off-season, the orchestra members formed string quartets, trios, and quintets to create new musical worlds or go on world tours.
Jun Hyuk’s shows became incredible news.
His performance music was not just the elegant and beautiful symphonies he had released until now, but also sophisticated music that was even avant-garde.
All media outlets tried to write articles at the same time.
Jun Hyuk and his orchestra were Explorer. He threw the music that was for easy listening to other orchestras, and they only played the strange and complex music that endlessly explored music and sound.
It had been difficult to get tickets to Jun Hyuk’s shows at first, but the empty seats started to increase. Only ⅔ of the seats filled, and the people in that ⅔ were always the same.
Juilliard, Eastman, Clayton Conservatory’s lovers of music and professional musicians, orchestra conductors, critics, and music professors always took those seats.
Since he released a new piece after just 2 shows, they could only listen to the music in albums if they missed a single how.
There were orchestras that put on Jun Hyuk’s experimental songs, but they always led to being scorned. Not just anyone can train a perfect orchestra.
There was no change to Jun Hyuk’s life as though running on clockwork. He went back and forth from his house and the center, put his all into his music activity, released most of his new songs as scores, and did not play the music himself.
Jun Hyuk enjoyed listening to the albums that musicians created with his music. At times, he would discover brilliant talents for whom he would create songs for and produce albums with.
Endlessly complicated and experimental contemporary and classical, romantic, and inherited classical. And pop, rock, jazz, and blues, which the public goes crazy for. It was mysterious that all of this music came from the head and fingertips of a single person.
In the end, Rolling Stones magazine created Jun’s Chart. They created a chart for albums and singles created with Jun Hyuk’s original songs as the base.
The interesting part was that those ranking in the top of Jun’s Chart usually ranked in the top of the Billboard chart.
People gave the one elevator in JS Center a name.
Elevator to Star!
People who get a call from Jun Hyuk to meet, take the elevator down to the studio, and become stars. When this phenomenon repeated, there were more and more rookie musicians who released albums and singles with Jun Hyuk’s music.
***
Jun Hyuk’s travels to find new sounds and music did not end.
If he got information of an instrument that he never heard before, he immediately got on his private plane to go see it.
He only came back after hearing it and on the occasion he discovered an instrument that he liked, he needed to have it even if he needed to pay a fortune for it.
New sound, new music. Jun Hyuk was wandering around in search of this.
“Tara, let’s go to India.”
“India?”
“Yeah. I found an instrument that’s believed to be in the family of sitars.”
The sitar was originally a Persian lute-style stringed instrument, but it went over to India to develop. It is representative to India with its unique and subtle tone, so it gives off the atmosphere of India just by playing it.
“The sitar’s shape is completely different. It isn’t round, and it looks like a hip. It’s showing that the sitar was formed after the female body.”
“It makes sound? If it’s the original form, isn’t it really old?”
“120 years. I heard the restoration work is done and they’re looking for strings based on old documents. I want to see it before it’s completely restored. We need to attach different strings to it and hear their sounds.”
Judging from Jun Hyuk’s excited voice, it looks like they cannot avoid getting on the plane to India. Tara put a few staff members and bodyguards on standby, and reserved a hotel under staff name.
They always went quietly when traveling like this.
The day that Jun Hyuk spoke, he went to Mumbai in India.
***
Jun Hyuk was locked in the procession of terrible traffic, and ignored the children pushing their faces up against the window of his limousine.
Though the children could not see the people sitting inside the car because of the tinted windows, they kept yelling help and begging.
He donated astronomical amounts of money until now, but it looked like the numbers of these kinds of kids did not go down.
All of the staff members sitting inside the car were holding their breaths because of Jun Hyuk’s uncomfortable face.
When the sound of begging children came through the car windows, they started sounding like solos to duets, trios to choruses, and Jun Hyuk smiled bitterly.
It was a moment when he began to dislike his ability to hear even this tragic cry of young children as music.
Jun Hyuk’s eyes suddenly opened wide.
‘Did I hear wrong?’
Jun Hyuk’s mind heard a solo sound come through among the loud chorus. No, it seemed like it was not his mind but his ears hearing the sound.
However, it was neither a mistake nor a sound he heard in his head.
The solo sound coming weakly through the thick window is clearly a girl’s voice.
Jun Hyuk quickly rolled the window down and within moments, a few children’s hands came inside the car. And the sound, ‘help,’ came flooding into the car all at once.
“Jun, what are you doing?”
Tara gave the staff a look to roll the window back up, but Jun Hyuk put up his hand to restrain them.
“Leave it. Don’t roll it up.”
Jun Hyuk started to become nervous with his fingers interlocked, stuck in a traffic jam. Why can’t he hear it? Was it really a mistake?
Then when the car began to move little by little, Jun Hyuk quickly shouted,
“Stop. Don’t move.”
When Jun Hyuk’s limousine stopped moving, cars began to honk behind them but Jun Hyuk did not budge an inch.
Even a single moment is good. Whether he heard it in his head or with his ears, he wants to hear it once again.
Jun Hyuk suddenly opened the car door and got out. The doors to a van right behind opened and 6 sturdy men came out to surround him.
“What is it? Maestro, are you okay?”
The bodyguards first checked on Jun Hyuk’s state and then blocked the children swarming toward him.
“I’m okay. Don’t push the children too much.”
He is sure. The sound is not something he made up in his head, but a sound he heard outside.
At that moment, he heard another weak sound ‘help’ among the kids begging.
Jun Hyuk pushed through the children and chased that sound.
Unlike the children group of children swarmed together, there was a small girl a footstep away with her back turned.
That young girl wore a t-shirt and skirt more ragged than the clothes of the other children, as she looked far away and yelled ‘help’.
“Jun, let’s just go. It’s dangerous here.”
Tara rushed out to look around Jun Hyuk and rushed to speak, but Jun Hyuk did not move.
“Did you hear that voice just now? It’s that kid’s voice.”
The girl must have heard the buzz behind her because she turned her body in the direction of the noise and put out her hand.
When Jun Hyuk saw her, he was so surprised he stumbled and his bodyguards needed to support him.
Her skin was scarred from a severe burn. She is blind.
Jun Hyuk steadied himself and spoke to the translator standing next to Tara,
“The song that this girl sang just now… No, tell her to say ‘help’ just as she did before. Tell her I’ll give her money, too.”
Before the translator could finish speaking, the little girl said ‘help’. It was not just the sound of her saying a word. It was a strange sound as if a sound is on top of an odd tone.
Jun Hyuk felt a thrill as though electricity ran through his whole body.
‘There’s a child in the world with a voice like this… It wasn’t a mistake.’
When Jun Hyuk put out his hand to touch the child’s head, the translator quickly yelled,
“Stop!”
Jun Hyuk stopped and the translator quickly spoke,
“Look carefully. She’s blind. That was done on purpose to get pity from foreigners when she begs. Look at those kids begging over there. Aren’t several of them disabled?”
There were children without a hand or a leg standing a step away from them because of the bodyguards.
“What? Then are you saying that they did this to these kids on purpose?”
Everyone became speechless because of the translator’s shocking words. Crippling children just to have them beg? He was so furious his whole body began to tremble.
“That’s right. They’re all children of the lowest class. They’re sold off for nothing to be crippled like this and then sent out to beg. Then when little girls are old enough, they are sent out as prostitutes. There will be dangerous people behind her. And you’ll suffer if you touch someone of the lowest class.”