Hello!  Thank you for visiting my website.  I'm Duk-Kyung, or DK as my friends like to call me.  

​​

I was born in Seoul, South Korea, to a devout catholic family.  I started playing the piano at the age of 4.  I had many dreams as a child, for example, to become a novelist or a cartoonist.  

​​

When I was 14, my family immigrated to Vancouver, Canada.  There I met a German piano teacher whose love for Bach left me a strong impression.  Then there was Glenn Gould.  Glenn Gould and Johann Sebastian Bach were my idols throughout my teenage years.  It was the fugue which I was obsessed with.  I was deeply religious back then and said daily rosaries.  Fugue as a form and as written by Bach, resembled my daily rosaries.  I never fitted in with other teenage girls, especially after we moved to Canada, and I took refuge in J.S.Bach, The Well-Tempered Klavier, The Musical Offering, The Art of Fugue, Goldberg Variations, and Glenn Gould.  This is also when I started making monthly bus trips to the Vancouver Public Library in downtown Vancouver to borrow books - anything, everything written by Arnold Schoenberg, Schenker, Hindemith and Charles Rosen.  I started writing music too - many attempts at fugues, typical young passsionate Romantic pieces in the style of Rachmaninoff or Schumann, dabbling in Schoenberg's serial-technique, for example.  

​

I went to McGill University, Montreal.  I studied composition with Brian Cherney, John Rea, Jean Lesage, and piano with Marina Mdivani.  Absolutely fantastic years in terms of growth and maturity both as a musician and a human-being.  Around this time, I met my future husband too.

​

I studied conducting with Raffi Armenian at the Conservatoire de musique de Montreal.  Another greatest influence was Veronique Lacroix.  Both of them taught me how to study scores and thus, what and how to conduct.

​

My husband and I moved to Great Britain, and I studied conducting further at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, or Royal Conservatoire of Scotland as it is called nowadays. During this period, I was extremely depressed.  I survived it with selfless love and faith from my dear husband.  

​

Soon after the birth of my son, we moved to my husband's native Sweden.  We now live in a nice blue house in a small town called Heby where I can study scores and play my steinway grand piano.

 

I have special love for instrumental music, especially that of Schumann, Bruckner and Beethoven.  The most satisfying musical experience for me is a symphony, or a sonata.  I also believe in promoting new music by living composers.