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The Korean-born German composer Isang Yun (1917-1995) has been a highly regarded composer in Germany since he began his compositional career with the premieres of Fünf Stücke for piano and Musik für sieben Instrumente in 1959. Yun’s native country also slowly began to realize his significance as a musician after his death. Nonetheless, Yun’s music remains comparatively little known in the United States. There has been much published about him and his music in Germany and Korea where his music is also frequently performed, but there has been almost no significant literature entirely dedicated to him in English; the exceptions include a small number of dissertations written on Yun in the United States. Yun’s innovative aesthetics and compositional approaches, a by-product of his cross-cultural experiences as a post-colonial diasporic intellectual in Europe, should interest more audiences in the U.S. where, in the words of Jeongmee Kim, “multiple ethnicities intermingle resulting in numerous aesthetic hybrids.” Realistically seen, I’ve had two experiences, and I know the practice of both Asian music and European. I am equally at home in both fields. I’m a man living today, and within me is the Asia of the past combined with the Europe of today. My purpose is not an artificial connection, but I’m naturally convinced of the unity of these two elements. For that reason it’s impossible to categorize my music as either European or Asian. I am exactly in the middle. That’s my world and my independent entity.1 - Isang Yun From his childhood in Japanese-occupied Korea throughout his stay in Germany, Yun was always somewhere between the two cultures, East and West, and through this cultural displacement, he created his very own “hybridity” of ideas. 2 But, the problem here is not to look for traces of Korean or European characteristics in his music but to explain how the tension of the two cultures came to shape Yun’s music.

Indonesia’s embrace of foreign popular music began during the colonial era, with recordings of jazz and similar forms imported from Europe and the U.S. In recent decades, as Indonesians developed an indigenous popular music industry, other foreign influences have entered the popular music scene in Indonesia. Most prominent among these recently is Korean pop (“K-pop”)—which swept into Korea suddenly in the early 2000s along with a flood of Korean TV dramas. Few Indonesians could have named a Korean pop star in the 1990s, but by 2005 Korean dramas occupied primetime slots on several major TV networks and legal and pirated CDs of Rain, Se7en, and earlier stars (S.E.S., H.O.T., Shinhwa) were sold widely. BoA, born in Korea but producing CDs in Japan, was more closely associated with J-Pop, but came to be known as another KPop star. How and why did these stars from Korea gain the attention and the fandom of Indonesians? The sudden surge in awareness of Korea due to TV dramas is part of the picture, but fanrelated print media and, above all, social media have contributed in a spectacular fashion. Based on field work in Indonesia in 2005, 2008, 2010, 2013, and 2016, and extensive exploration of internet sources, I trace the contours of K-pop fandom in Indonesia, assessing the methods of distribution, the factors articulated by Kpop fans as contributing to their involvement with and enjoyment of K-pop music and its key figures. I consider the ways in which Indonesians are constructing notions of “Koreanness” in their interaction with Korean popular culture and the reasons underlying its appeal in relation to other popular musics transmitted transnationally. I conclude by considering whether the “Korean Wave” in Indonesia represents a new Asian cosmopolitanism more than an interest in “Korea” per se, as is claimed by the Korean media, and comment on the recent decline in K-pop fandom in Indonesia.

This paper studies the ritual music performed in the Jongmyo Shrine that began during the Joseon Period. The major focuses of this research are the introduction of the Jongmyo Shrine, its structure and system, and the classification and the make-up of the Jongmyo Shrine. This study is based on my doctoral thesis <A Study of System, Philosophical Foundation, and Historical Development of Jongmyo Ancestral Shrine Music>, which was submitted to the Seonggeungwan University in February 2012. This work will be followed by <A Study on Jongmyo Jeryeak II>, which will be published in the near future.

Popular culture in Asia, including music, is intensely transnational, involving not only exchanges with the West, but also the traffic of regional popular musics between Asian countries. The dynamics of intra-Asian popular cultural flows, however, are much more complicated and locality-specific than it may first appear to be. In this essay I address the contrast in pop musical “flows” between Japan and Korea. Recently the popular press has made much of the Korean Wave (the demand throughout Asia for Korean popular cultural products, including music). This has, indeed, been an important new development, an area that scholars have begun to document and interpret. However, the coverage is distorting, suggesting that Korea is replacing Japan as the main trend-setter in Asia. Japan’s continuing and substantial influences throughout Asia, and on contemporary Korean popular culture in particular, have been rather intentionally underestimated, I argue, and Korea’s recent influences in Japan have been exaggerated and overvalued. More specifically, the nature of Korean popular musical presence in Japan is categorically different from the Japanese presence in Korea. Korean pop music undergoes a process of “repackaging” by the Japanese music industry, rendering it, while not completely “de-Koreanized,” substantially “Japanized.” In contrast, Japanese pop is imported and consumed in Korea mostly “as is,” suggesting that Korean audiences relish new Japanese sounds and images in ways that are not reciprocated as Japanese encounter pop from Korea. I illustrate these contrasts with examples of recent pop from both countries and interpret them in light of the troubled history of Korea-Japan relations.

In this paper, the dynamics of Okinawan performing arts in Nanyo is examined. During the period of Japanese administration (1914-1945), numerous people from Okinawa moved to Nanyo for work. Especially in Saipan, Okinawan performing arts with sanshin accomplishment flourished. In the 1920s, Okinawan ordinary people with sanshin moved to Nanyo. In the 1930s, playhouses of Okinawan performing arts were built in Saipan and Tinian and Ryukyuan classical dance and music disseminated to Okinawan immigrants. Inspired by ballet and the local dance movements, Inkichi Iraha composed and choreographed “Nanyo hama chidori”. The sound of the sanshin filled Saipan. These Okinawan entertainments, however did not influence the local dance and music. On the contrary, Okinawans adopted the Carolinian marching dance as an entertainment around 1940. The dance called tomin/Kanaka odori became popular and was performed at the harvest ceremony of the Nanyo Kohatsu Kaisha. Among the dance materials, “uatorofi” was most popular. The marching dance encouraged Okinawans in Camp Susupe soon after the Pacific war. Returnees revived tomin/Kanaka odori as good memories of a harvest in Nanyo after the 1960s, while keeping a lot of painful memories during the war. At Soki district, Ginoza village, the sanshin, which had become an instrument of the Okinawans since the 1920s was introduced, while at Enobi district, Uruma city, they kept the harmonica as an accompaniment of the dance. The tomin/Kanaka odori look exotic their due to the performers’ make up, attire and dance movements. People imagine the dance and Okinawan town in Nanyo during the Japanese period centrifugally, while enjoying the present dance centripetally. Supported by the Okinawan culture of village entertainment, the centripetal/centrifugal forces works their memory and imagination active, which sustain the champuru Okinawan tomin dance.

Korean Wave (Hallyu; ‘韓流’) referred first to the meaning of “the fashion of Korea surges” written and published by Beijing Youth Daily, China as early as November 1999. Development of the latest smart media makes the Korean Wave contents disseminating rapidly. The existing Korean Wave was a limited flow relating to the middle aged female class in Eastern Asia, while the Korean Wave centred on K-pop since the late 2000s is different in the method of dissemination. The latter is renamed as the ‘New Korean Wave (新 韓流)’ which has been spread by social media and exported to the USA, Europe, South America, and so on. The primary distribution base of the New Korean Wave includes SNS (Social Network Service) media – i.e. YouTube, iTunes, Facebook, Twitter, Blog, etc., which suit the characteristics of K-pop genre. The Korean Wave 3.0 can be the period of ‘diversification of the Korean Wave’. Periodically it starts with the huge success of Gangnam Style performed by Psy in 2012. As an important genre, it became spread to music, drama, game, film, cartoon, character, Korean cuisine, Korean language. Geographically it has been diffused further Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Africa, the USA, etc., beyond China, Japan, Taiwan. The main contents include K-pop, Idols and on-line gaming. In particular, the enormous success of Gangnam Style brought to the event that broadened boundaries across the world. The Korean Wave that has been in great demand is now, however, receiving a great shock with the anti-Korean Wave in Japan and the China’s retaliation against Thaad. Luckily the Hallyu marketing is beyond the confine of China and Japan. As heavy reliance on China and Japan can be variable according to the political situations, it is necessary for us to make more efforts for Hallyu marketing.

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.

This paper is aimed at discussing the current status of Korean wave or Hallyu in the African continent by discussing major developments and strategies. It begins with the description of the historical roots and the progress in the relationship between Korea and African countries in the past several decades. The paper continues exploring into the emerging cultural force of Hallyu in action in the African continent and discusses further on the essence of the Korean Wave along with its manifestations and effects as a new engine for economic growth and cultural diplomacy or soft power. Cultural diplomatic strategy of China is briefly presented as a comparison to that of Korea’s after discussing the major developments related to cultural exchanges between South Korea and African countries at an official level. Special discussions on major Hallyu related activities and trends in some sub-Saharan countries such as South Africa, Ethiopia, and Nigeria will follow in the last section.