Publisher description: K-pop, referring to pop and dance music performed by idol groups mainly targeted at teens, has been expanding in popularity beyond Asia to Europe and South America. It was the 1990s when this school of music first appeared in Korea, but its emergence was not abrupt and its roots are sunk deep into … [Read More]
Booklist: Music history (page 2)
Music in Korea: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
Korean Pop Music – Riding the Wave
Publisher description: Korean popular music has in the last decade become a significant model for youth culture throughout Asia. Yet, although the Korean music industry is both vibrant and massive, this is the first book-length work devoted to the subject to appear in English. The book offers a comprehensive account, written by thirteen scholars of … [Read More]
Korean Mask Dance Dramas: Their History and Structural Principles
From the publisher’s website: The Korean mask dramas have been performed by professional or non-professional players from among the common people over a long time. To correctly understand the mask dramas, both historical investigation through research materials and folkloristic investigation through field study are necessary. The author, an initiate of Bukcheongsaja-nori, a representative Korean mask … [Read More]
Perspectives on Korean Dance
From the publisher’s website: The first comprehensive English language study of Korean dance. Winner of the Congress on Research in Dance’s (CORD) Outstanding Publication Award (2003) From palace to village street to international stage, Korean dance is a vibrant and complex art comprised of many different forms. In Perspectives on Korean Dance, Judy Van Zile … [Read More]
The Korean Singer of Tales
Publisher description: P’ansori, the traditional oral narrative of Korea, is sung by a highly trained soloist to the accompaniment of complex drumming. The singer both narrates the story and dramatizes all the characters, male and female. Performances require as long as six hours and make extraordinary vocal demands. In the first book-length treatment in English … [Read More]