Even a well-funded professional arts organization would find this a daunting task: book the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts; contract the Metropolitan Orchestra and VSO conductor Ken Hsieh; hire a Korean dance troupe, a contemporary dancer, and a rock band; line up support from the City of Vancouver and the Korean consulate; and attract further corporate and media sponsorship from about 20 groups. But composer and kayagum virtuoso Grace Jong Eun Lee has done this on her own–and somehow, in the middle of the whirlwind, she's also found time to make some major changes to her instrument.

The kayagum, you see, is just too quiet. One of Korea's most iconic instruments, this zitherlike ancestor of the koto possesses a strikingly woody sound, but it's not much louder than speech. In order for the instrument to be audible over symphonic strings–let alone brass or amplified guitar–it needs to be fitted with a pickup system. But no one out there is making an electric kayagum, so Lee has had to retrofit her acoustic one herself.

"I'd been thinking about it a long time, but I just did it a couple of months ago," she reports, on the line from her South Vancouver home. "It's worth it to be able to play with all kinds of instruments. The sonority has been a little changed, and I have to be careful with changing the amplifier's sound, and also with vibration. It's challenging, but something got into me and I had to do this."

There are other complications: Korean music is fundamentally different from European modes, both philosophically and technically, and reconciling those differences has been a key component of Lee's 10-year career as a professional musician and composer.

"The tone system is completely different," she explains. "That's always a problem that I have to think about very carefully. Western instruments are in perfect pitch; we have to tune them really perfectly. But the kayagum is always flexible”¦the tone colour is always changing. So I have to make it close to perfect pitch with the western instruments. But I don't want it to be perfect; I want it to be more the Asian style of flowing”¦like nature sounds. Again, it's a philosophical idea that I want to bring up: we can be unique, but we can also be one, all together."

The first part of Lee's ambitious program, which she'll present at the Chan Centre on Sunday (September 16), will focus on cross-cultural collaborations of the orchestral kind. Opening the night will be Lee's gorgeous "Dance of Sunrise", a musical portrait of dawn on the Vancouver waterfront, which will be followed by a further four originals. Following an intermission, Lee will return for a mixed program of instrumental solos, chamber music, and dance, after which she'll hook up with the Brink, an electrified four-piece, for Vancouver's first collaboration between a kayagum player and a rock band.

The tune? "Amazing Grace". An odd choice, perhaps, but in this context, entirely appropriate.

Grace Jong Eun Lee plays the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on Sunday (September 16).