earticle

영어

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.