As our musical and artistic tastes become increasingly formed and cemented by closed circuits of media networks, most of us acknowledge that the tributaries of traditional arts need to join an established waterway to survive. Hallyu is often this river into which all other genres flow. But hallyu (韓流) is not actually “the current out of Korea” but rather seoryu (西流), a tidal incursion from the west that, on its ebb tide, carries a redefined Koreanness back to where it started. With the erosion of its “cultural integrity” by the tidal force of globalization, South Korea has drifted into an intertidal mixing zone, with officials increasingly supporting a “fusion” of the old local traditions with non-Korean and popular modern forms. The hybrid results of such melding exemplify the “ironic compromise” Homi Bhabha found in Jacques Lacan’s writings on mimicry, wherein Lacan asserts the result of mimicry is never of the local culture becoming the same as that under whose influence it has fallen, but rather an accumulator of certain affects of that influence. Since its coining by the Jangakweon (掌樂院 institute in charge of music) in the late Joseon dynasty, as a musical sensibility separate from western “music” (音樂), gugak, the music of Korea, has thrived as a living, breathing category of sound by perpetually transforming itself. Now more than ever, one of the biggest challenges for Korean traditional music—how we define it and otherwise think about it, how we perform it, and how we work to develop its audience in Korea and abroad—is to determine how best to nurture its musical aesthetic. How do we sustain Korean music’s unique identity as it fuses with outside and more popular genres to become the new face of the nation? This is not a new question, but finding answers to it in fusion’s murky estuary has never been trickier. This paper travels back upstream in search of historical evidence of gugak’s expansion and redefinition over the past 100 years.
목차
Abstract Introduction The Gisaeng Example: Borrowing from Within Fusion and Gugak Jazz and Gugak Decolonization and the Musical Bonds of Common Loss Popular Culture’s “durable palimpsest of racial representations” Conclusion References
아시아에서 벌어지는 모든 음악활동을 연구합니다.
특히 아시아에서 일어나고 있는 유럽 음악 편중의 음악상황을 아시아음악 중심으로 전환하기 위한 연구와 운동을 합니다. 아시아음악은 아시아인이 가장 잘 연구할 수 있다는 점에서 아시아음악학 연구는 아시아 학자에 의하여 주도되어야 한다고 생각하는 사람들의 모임입니다.
이러한 목적 달성을 위하여 아시아음악의 역사 이론 연주를 연구합니다. 이 연구 성과는 Asian Musicology라는 영문 저널을 발행하고 있습니다.