Guest Speaker
Hyunjin Yoe, Ethnomusicology
"Making New Tradition: Contemporary Practices of Korean Traditional Musician in Cosmpolitan Seoul"
Preservation of cultural assets has been
considered as an important part of maintaining the country’s legacy in South
Korea, and both tangible and intangible cultural properties are protected by
the Cultural Property Preservation Law promulgated in 1962 by the Park Chung
Hee regime. Since the promulgation of the law, intangible cultural properties,
particularly gugak (national/traditional
music), have been rigorously “protected” from any changes, and has become so
distant from most Koreans’ contemporary life. Recently, however, many attempts
to evolve the traditions from the past into that of contemporary South Korea
have been made among the younger generation of gugak musicians, and it is, I contend, facilitated by the new,
cosmopolitan diversity of Seoul. Focusing on one particular gugak group, Ensemble Sinawi, this paper
explores how the musicians deal with the long-standing traditions, which has
been treated like music in a museum, in Seoul as a global city with full of
cosmopolitan impulses. Firmly rooted in traditional improvisatory musical genre
(sinawi), the group incorporates
non-traditional musical elements, such as a piano, scat singing and harmony,
and collaborates with various art genres, such as ballet, modern dance,
b-boying and media art. Moreover, their sense of duty as a musician—to promote gugak in the world while being
indifferent to a secular realm of music—demonstrates a combination of
nationalism and Western Romanticism, betraying their cosmopolitan identity,
living in Seoul, South Korea. In short, through personal interviews, liner
notes, and live concerts and videos, this paper first discusses the musical
practices under the preservation law as a background, and then examines the
contemporary practices of gugak
musicians and their relationship to cosmopolitan Seoul.
Guest Speaker
In Harmonielehre (1906), Schenker likens musical motives to biological species, espousing a view fundamentally different from Schoenberg’s claim that a musical composition is a “living body that is centrally controlled.” In Schenker’s analogy, motives—rather than entire pieces—have the same ontological status as organisms and are related by forces devoid of any omniscient psychology. Bartók, in his ethnomusicological writings, constructed a similar conception, describing a folk song’s performances as analogous to individual organisms and its “internal form” as analogous to the species to which each performance belongs. Elsewhere, he compares such improvisation to his own compositional techniques of motivic variation.
Taking such analogies seriously, however, would require some new analytical technology: one could reformulate Lewin’s transformation networks as rooted tree structures or perhaps attempt to flesh
out Dora Hanninen’s idea of “associative lineages.” But in any case, a revised ontology of the musical work would also be required, for viewing motivic forms as abstract organisms sets them—and the work itself—at an even further level of remove from the composer. In order to connect this naïve organicism with contemporary thought, I suggest understanding motivic trees as similar to what Alain Badiou calls “transcendentals of a world”: “relational networks of identities and differences.” We can understand motivic logics, that is, as transcendental logics belonging to a work’s “mikrokosmos.” As a demonstration, I construct a genealogical tree for Bartók’s Improvisation, op. 20, no. 5 (1920), in the process discovering genetic connections between musical objects that at first seem diametrically opposed."
James Bennett, Music Theory
"The Transcendental Logic of Musical Trees"
"The Transcendental Logic of Musical Trees"
In Harmonielehre (1906), Schenker likens musical motives to biological species, espousing a view fundamentally different from Schoenberg’s claim that a musical composition is a “living body that is centrally controlled.” In Schenker’s analogy, motives—rather than entire pieces—have the same ontological status as organisms and are related by forces devoid of any omniscient psychology. Bartók, in his ethnomusicological writings, constructed a similar conception, describing a folk song’s performances as analogous to individual organisms and its “internal form” as analogous to the species to which each performance belongs. Elsewhere, he compares such improvisation to his own compositional techniques of motivic variation.
Taking such analogies seriously, however, would require some new analytical technology: one could reformulate Lewin’s transformation networks as rooted tree structures or perhaps attempt to flesh
out Dora Hanninen’s idea of “associative lineages.” But in any case, a revised ontology of the musical work would also be required, for viewing motivic forms as abstract organisms sets them—and the work itself—at an even further level of remove from the composer. In order to connect this naïve organicism with contemporary thought, I suggest understanding motivic trees as similar to what Alain Badiou calls “transcendentals of a world”: “relational networks of identities and differences.” We can understand motivic logics, that is, as transcendental logics belonging to a work’s “mikrokosmos.” As a demonstration, I construct a genealogical tree for Bartók’s Improvisation, op. 20, no. 5 (1920), in the process discovering genetic connections between musical objects that at first seem diametrically opposed."
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