Twentieth-century discourses on Korean music in Korea.

Abstract

The colonial period represents a complex situation in which Korean music performances were transformed to fit changing social conditions. Moreover, it was a period when Koreans began to perceive certain musical genres as vehicles to express Koreanness. In the second half of the twentieth century, Korean people and the modern Korean state used traditional and neotraditional music to articulate their political and cultural concerns. After the Liberation (1945), when a new Korean nation-state was being built, Korean music was used as a tool to unite the Korean people by heightening their cultural identity and asserting national identity to the world. The government embraced both <italic> cho&caron;ngak</italic> [court music and the music of the literati] and <italic> minsogak</italic> [folk music] as Korean music. In addition to preserving traditional music, the government encouraged the creation of neotraditional music, which expressed Korean modernity blended with tradition. During Park Chung Hee's reign (1961--79), both the government and university students used Korean music for explicitly political goals. Park promoted traditional court music to legitimize his power, seized through a coup d'etat, and, in an attempt to associate himself with the populace, supported <italic>minsogak</italic>. His strategy motivated university students to stage politically oppositional folk performances, such as <italic>t'alch'um </italic> [mask-dance drama] and <italic>p'ungmul</italic> [farmers' band music] for their Cultural Movement, launched to challenge the authoritarian Park regime and the surge of Western popular culture. By the late 1970s, the students had kindled an internet in Korean music among the general public. In the 1980s and the 1990s, Korean music and dance performances began to be offered on a regular basis by the National Center and Chongdong Theater. The mission of these performances is twofold: to teach Koreans their cultural heritage, and to provide foreigners with opportunities to experience Korean culture. This study originates in the author's questions about the meanings of current government-sponsored performances of Korean music and dance. The data were collected through fieldwork in Seoul (1999--2000), interviews with organizers, performers, and audience members, and both on and off the internet surveys. Other resources for the study include newspaper articles, monographs, journal articles, and program pamphlets.