From the publisher’s website: Despite its longstanding position as a distinct cultural force in East Asia, Korea continues to be underrepresented in world music texts. Music in Korea is the first brief, single-volume text to provide a thematic, succinct introduction to the music of Korea—a region whose volatile political climate has often overshadowed its rich cultural and … [Read More]
Booklist: Music and Performance (page 4)
Hearts of Pine: Songs in the Lives of Three Korean Survivors of the Japanese Comfort Women
From the publisher’s website: In the wake of the wartime experience of sexual slavery for the Japanese military during the Asia-Pacific War (1930-45), Korean survivors lived under great pressure not to speak about what had happened to them. These sexual slaves were known as “comfort women,” and this book brings us into the lives of … [Read More]
SamulNori: Contemporary Korean Drumming and the Rebirth of Itinerant Performance Culture
In 1978, four musicians crowded into a cramped basement theater in downtown Seoul, where they, for the first time, brought the rural percussive art of p’ungmul to a burgeoning urban audience. In doing so, they began a decades-long reinvention of tradition, one that would eventually create an entirely new genre of music and a national symbol for … [Read More]
Exploring North Korean Arts
This book is a cooperation between the MAK and the University of Vienna and contains a number of in-depth essays by international writers on a wide spectrum of issues, and with much detailed background information. The relationship between art and ideology is examined, how modern and traditional values are dealt with, as well as the commercial … [Read More]
Harmonia Koreana: A Short History of 20th century Korean Music
From the publisher’s website: Harmonia Koreana: A Short History of 20th-century Korean Music is a brief overview of the introduction and development of Western classical music in Korea. This book discusses the distinguishing features of the Korean composer’s musical work in general and goes in to more depth on several of modern music’s most important … [Read More]
Daehangno: Theater District in Seoul
From the publisher’s website: Daehangno is generally called a street of youth. However, it does not mean it is only frequented by young people. Daehangno is where the youthful passion of elderly artists is still tangible, where the youthful ardor of retired professors is still palpable and where the budding romance of late poets is … [Read More]
Consuming Korean Tradition in Early and Late Modernity: Commodification, Tourism, and Performance
From the publisher’s website: Contributors to this volume explore the irony of modern things made in the image of a traditional “us.” They describe the multifaceted ways “tradition” is produced and consumed within the frame of contemporary Korean life and how these processes are enabled by different apparatuses of modernity that Koreans first encountered in … [Read More]
In Search of Korean Traditional Opera: Discourses of Changguk
This is the first book on Korean opera in a language other than Korean. Its subject is ch’angguk, a form of musical theater that has developed over the last hundred years from the older narrative singing tradition of p’ansori. Andrew Killick examines the history and current practice of ch’angguk as an ongoing attempt to invent a traditional Korean opera form to … [Read More]
Illusive Utopia: Theater, Film, and Everyday Performance in North Korea
Publisher description: No nation stages massive parades and collective performances on the scale of North Korea. Even amid a series of intense political/economic crises and international conflicts, the financially troubled country continues to invest massive amounts of resources to sponsor unflinching displays of patriotism, glorifying its leaders and revolutionary history through state rituals that can … [Read More]
Music of the Korean Renaissance: Songs and Dances of the Fifteenth Century
From the publisher’s website: Koreans of the fifteenth century recorded for posterity a large body of music which has been preserved to the present day. This book presents that music in transcription, with an introductory section providing detailed background on the music itself and on the sources, the song texts, court dances, musical instruments and … [Read More]
Pop Goes Korea: Behind the Revolution in Movies, Music, and Internet Culture
From the publisher’s website: From kim chee to kim chic! South Korea came from nowhere in the 1990s to become one of the biggest producers of pop content (movies, music, comic books, TV dramas, online gaming) in Asia and the West. Why? Who’s behind it? Mark James Russell tells an exciting tale of rapid growth … [Read More]
Korean Kayagum Sanjo: A Traditional Instrumental Genre
From the publisher’s website: The Korean genre of sanjo is today one of the most popular genres of traditional music, taught in schools and universities within Korea, and a staple of national and international performance tours. Sanjo comprises a set of related pieces for solo melodic instrument and drum. A number of ‘schools’ (ryu) are … [Read More]
Healing Rhythms: The World of South Korea’s East Coast Hereditary Shamans
Still today, in South Korea, many people pay for the services of mudang – the intermediaries of Korea’s syncretic folk religion. The majority of mudang are called to the profession by gods; their clients are individuals or small groups and they focus on the use of spirit-power (‘possession’) for diagnosis and problem-solving. There is, however, … [Read More]
Stories inside Stories: Music in the Making of the Korean Olympic Ceremonies
This volume is about the music in the opening and closing ceremonies of the Seoul Olympics (1988) that were watched on television by millions of people. More specifically, the book is about the planning and decisions that resulted in a remarkable presentation, a narrative enacted in mythic terms from Korean cosmology, archetypes from world religions, … [Read More]
Creating Korean Music: Tradition, Innovation and the Discourse of Identity
From the publisher’s website: With the rise of nationalism in the Republic of Korea, music has come to play a central role in the discourse of identity. This volume asks what Koreans consider makes music Korean, and how meaning is ascribed to musical creation. Keith Howard explores specific aspects of creativity that are designed to … [Read More]
Preserving Korean Music: Intangible Cultural Properties as Icons of Identity
As Korea has developed and modernized, music has come to play a central role as a symbol of national identity. Nationalism has been stage managed by scholars, journalists and, from the beginning of the 1960s, by the state, as music genres have been documented, preserved and promoted as ‘Intangible Cultural Properties’. Practitioners have been appointed … [Read More]