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Below is a list of papers given at the 2004 SEM conference that dealt with Korean Music.
Clicking the title will link you with an abstract of the paper.
In case you weren't there, here's something else you
missed!
Return to Newsletter Issue Sixteen
"Third Generation Composers" and Nationalism in Contemporary Korea
Jinmi Huh Davidson (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Korean Music on the Margins
Hilary V. Finchum-Sung (Intercultural Institute of California)
Piano Pieces by South Korean Composers
Okon Hwang (Eastern Connecticut State University)
Interpreting Music Traffic:Influences of Japanese Popular Music on Korean Popular Music Since the mid-1990s
Eun-Young Jung (University of Pittsburgh)
Ch'angguk Opera as a Showcase for Korean Traditional Music
Andrew Killick (University of Sheffield)
Finding a Niche for the Avant-Garde Outside the Academy: The Experimental Dimension of Korea's Fusion Music
R. Anderson Sutton
Gender for Sale: The Marketing of Gender Ideals in South Korean Music Videos
Heather Willoughby (Wittenburg University)
Praying Identities:Second-Generation Korean-American Christians and Tongsongkido
Paul J. Yoon (Columbia University)
"Third Generation Composers" and Nationalism in Contemporary Korea
Jinmi Huh Davidson (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
1945 marked a historic point in Korea's musical
development. Whereas post- 1945 Euro-American developments saw a period
of stylistic transition for composers, with approaches to composition
transcending functional tonality, in impoverished postwar Korea,
musicians were tasked with reviving traditional music after decades of
enforced neglect, while also dealing with an insurgence of Western music.
During this acclimation, the two musical worlds were largely disjoint.
Since the 1960's, as both established secure footholds, the aesthetics have
begun converging as the goals of traditional Korean musicians moved beyond
preservation, and the Western-style composers' interests moved beyond the
avant-garde toward their own cultural heritage. By the 1980s, discourses on the
historical, sociological and political significance of music were commonplace in
aesthetic discussions of music, while nationalistic musical idioms sprouted throughout
Korean music. In 1980 the circle of self-proclaimed "Third Generation
Composers" formed in reaction to the second generation's unconditional
embodiment of Western music. This group accepts the symbolic correlation
of the "third generation" and "third world" to which they
belong. They create neither traditional Korean nor Western compositions,
but strive for a new national expression that embodies both musical
cultures. Through a study of the aesthetics expressed in the composers'
writings and an analysis of their music, this paper shows how the
"Third Generation Composers" synthesize traditional Korean
music and Western classical music in hopes of creating music with a contemporary
Korean perspective.
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Korean Music on the Margins
Hilary V. Finchum-Sung (Intercultural Institute of California)
Over 100 years of dramatic events on the Korean peninsula have made the
Korea of today a different place from that of a century ago. The cultural
transformations emerging from the influence of importations, mass media
flows, and changing audience demographics have created a marginal space
for music, which represents flexible notions of contemporary Korean
cultural character. This panel examines Korean music within this fluid
space, distinguished by the contention with which people regard its
contribution to South Korean musical culture. Each paper probes into
aspects of the dynamics underlying recent musical activity involving
Korean musicians who, whether "pop" or "art," seek
to transgress established conceptual boundaries with respect to what they
perform and for whom. The first
panelist analyzes foreign consumption patterns of Korean popular music,
which opens the way for questions concerning the music's appeal to
non-Korean audiences. The second panelist explores the cultural politics
behind Japanese influence on Korean popular music. The paper goes beyond
the issues of simple importation or imitation to ask how the
consumption of Japanese music impacts and problematizes the
"Koreanness" of domestic tastes and cultural images. The third
panelist investigates the "experimental music" of two
recently-formed groups, who create and present music that stretches
beyond typical genre categorizations in South Korean conception, seeking a
niche between long-standing oral traditional practice, new composition,
and foreign musical styles.
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Piano Pieces by South Korean Composers
Okon Hwang (Eastern Connecticut State University)
Although the main staple for performers and musicologists in the West has been compositions
by American and European composers, more and more are joining a movement
to play and study Western classical music composed by non- Westerners.
Performing piano pieces by South Korean composers, however, is still
virgin territory. No CDs or scores of their works are readily
available outside Korea and hardly anybody performs them. The situation
within South Korea is not any better. Despite Koreans’ willingness to
spend an enormous amount of money on Western classical music education,
this “West envy” has manifested in a peculiar way: South Korean performers
do not care to play or listen to pieces composed by one of their own. But
Koreans’ zeal for Western classical music education has produced a
significant number of composers over the years. As demonstrated in Han’guk jakgokga sajeon [Dictionary of
Korean Composers] (Seoul: Korean National University of Arts, 1999)
that lists about 900 composers, vibrant communities of composers for
Western classical music do exist in Korea and a great number of them
compose pieces for piano. Responding to one of this year’s conference
themes “Ethnomusicology and Western Classical Music”, this paper will
survey piano pieces by South Korean composers. By doing so, it intends to
scrutinize the nature of cultural ownership and add one more case study to
the discourse of globalization.
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Interpreting Musical Traffic:Influences of Japanese Popular Music on Korean Popular Music since the
mid-1990s
Eun-Young Jung (University of Pittsburgh)
Despite Korea's official ban on importing Japanese culture products from
1945 until recently, various forms of contemporary Japanese popular
culture, including music, have influenced contemporary Korean popular
culture through legal and illegal routes. Yet because of the sensitive
political relationship between the two countries, these influences have
been intentionally downplayed. In this paper, I analyze examples of
Japanese influence on recent Korean Pop. In January 1996, one of the top
Korean popular music groups, Roo'Ra, nearly disbanded after young Korean
fans discovered that their hit song, "Cheonsangyuae" (Love up in
Heaven), included a direct copy of the melody from "Omatsuri
Ninja" (Ninja Festival), by the Japanese music group Ninja in 1990.
The song was banned from Korean broadcast, and the incident raised public
debate about the nature of "Korean-ness" in popular music (although
it did not result in any official investigation into piracy or copyright
issues by the government or by scholars). Since 1998, as cultural
exchanges between Japan and Korea have become officially allowed, Japanese
influences have increased markedly, leading many Korean singers, writers,
and producers to feel threatened by having to compete directly with
Japanese music. Based on analyses of the musical styles, vocal techniques,
visual representations, and lyrics of contemporary popular songs from Japan
and Korea, I will pinpoint major trends in Japanese influence on Korean
popular music, which is not a simple matter of borrowing or imitation, but
a complex cultural issue bearing on Korean taste and cultural self-image.
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Ch'angguk Opera as a Showcase for Korean Traditional Music
Andrew Killick (University of Sheffield)
Ch'angguk opera has always hovered on the margins of the "traditional" performing
arts and had difficulty in being taken seriously as an expression
of Korean national culture. Though rooted in the revered traditional
narrative genre p'ansori, its relatively short history, its obvious
foreign influences, and its sometimes questionable artistic values have
kept it from being nominated for official recognition as an
"Intangible Cultural Asset" or otherwise admitted to the hallowed
ranks of the traditional. Yet at one time ch'angguk was known as kukkuk or
"national drama." Despite ch'angguk's marginal status, which I
have elsewhere described as "traditionesque" rather than
"traditional," I will argue that in one respect ch'angguk makes
a strong claim to represent the Korean nation, and that respect is its
music. That is, in extending the musical eclecticism of p'ansori to the
point where anything in the repertoire of kugak or
"national music" could be used when appropriate to the dramatic
context, ch'angguk arguably became the first genre to draw on the full
range of Korean traditional music without regard to distinctions of region
or class origin. I will examine this process with illustrations showing
the use of Korean music other than p'ansori in recent ch'angguk
productions, arguing that in becoming a showcase for the whole canon of
Korean traditional music, ch'angguk takes part in the construction of
a unified and exclusive Korean national identity.
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Finding a Niche for the Avant-Garde outside the Academy:
The Experimental Dimension of Korea's Fusion Music
R. Anderson Sutton (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Among the approaches Korean musicians have taken over the past 20 years toward combining
indigenous music with other traditions from around the world, a burgeoning
"experimental music" (silhôm
ûmak) genre is finding a small but enthusiastic following among Korean
musicians and audiences. Beside the practices of jazz and pop combinations
with Korean traditional music and the academic genre of new composition
for Korean instruments (ch'angjak kugak),
musicians whose formal training has included practical and
theoretical study of Korean music as well as Western art music have formed
ensembles whose music explores beyond and between the boundaries of these
musical traditions. These range from group improvisations reminiscent of
the traditional Korean folk ensemble music sinawi and harmonized versions of traditional court vocal
music ( kagok ) to sparse, free-rhythmic
pieces reminiscent of Cage's aleatory music or Stockhausen's serialism,
and pieces with recursive rhythmic and melodic patterns reminiscent of
Reich's minimalism. My paper focuses on musicians in two contrasting
groups: Jeongga Akhwe (a vocal group
drawing on indigenous art song) and Sang
Sang (an instrumental trio mixing indigenous Korean styles with
Western contemporary art music and free jazz). Based on observations of
concerts and rehearsals in 2003 and 2004, conversations with musicians and
audience members, and recent press coverage, my paper explores the
aesthetics of the music and the underlying processes by which it is
created; and it interprets the music in relation to shifting notions of
what constitutes "Korean music."
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Gender for Sale:
The Marketing of Gender Ideals in South Korean Music Videos
Heather A. Willoughby (Wittenberg University)
A six-DVD set of South Korea's most popular music videos was recently
released under the titleMissing You.
The videos, spanning the years of 1996-2001, reveal much about contemporary
Korean music, fashion and social trends. This paper will concentrate on
what the videos reveal about the performance of gender ideals. The
majority of the videos utilize music genres made popular in the West, and
imitate Western techniques of music video production and story lines.
In addition, in viewing the musicians and actors, there appears to be a
blanket acceptance of first-world ideals of beauty, power, femininity and
masculinity. Upon closer examination, however, a unique blend of
traditional Korean values and Western standards can be observed. This
paper will investigate some of the ways in which gender ideals are
performed within a specific musical context. I will analyze how male
performers create images of hyper-masculinity through extreme violence,
while at the same time exposing themselves as effeminate beings. Melding
Western images of strength and power with Korean notions of refinement and
intelligence enable the performer to create a characterization of the
ideal man. In the case of female performers, women are shown to
physically appropriate Western standards of beauty (obtained through
plastic surgery or other artificial means) while at the same time
maintaining traditional values of Korean femininity. Koreans' perceptions
of themselves as gendered beings are thus created and reflected by the
popular musicians, who in turn are marketed as ideal women and men.
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Praying Identities:
Second-Generation Korean-American Christians and T'ongsongkido
Paul J. Yoon, Columbia University
Scholarly works focusing on second-generation Korean-Americans
often emphasize the importance of the Korean Christian church for this
group, but these writings rarely detail the specific impact of theology or
religion in these people's lives. Moreover, these works posit practices,
such as t'ongsongkido (cry-out-loud prayer), as unproblematic markers of
ethnic identity. This paper looks at the use and interpretation of
t'ongsongkido among second-generation Korean-American Christians.
Specifically, I highlight the ways in which this practice is implicated in
the complex debates surrounding shifting notions of multiple intersecting
identities, such as ethnicity and religion. On the one hand, t'ongsongkido
is a culturally-grounded engagement with God, the affective force of which
resides in the creation of a sonic environment that is indicative of the
power of the Holy Spirit. This prayer practice is both an iconic aesthetic
mode for addressing God, and, self-reflexively, a "Korean" mode
of prayer. On the other hand, specifically for second-generation
Korean Americans, t'ongsongkido lies at the intersection of discourses on
biblical interpretation, gender, class, and ethnic authenticity. Although
this is an important prayer form for the second-generation, it is used
with caution. From this caution emerge new, and sometimes conflicting,
conceptions of what it means to be a Korean-American Christian, and, in
some cases, this label is rejected altogether.
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