2021, Vol.29, No.2

Journal of the Korean Society for Musicology 2024 KCI Impact Factor : 0.64

eISSN : 3092-2410
https://journal.kci.go.kr/musicology

Western music field in the early 20th-century colonial Korea witnessed the emergence of professional women musicians. Beginning with the music education for schoolgirls at Christian missionary school, Ewha and studying music abroad in Japan played a significant role in the birth of musical women as a career. In the case of Korea, women musicians first appeared in the public sphere in the early 1920s, a period under Japanese colonial rule. After that, approximately fifty women worked in the western music field as performers, music teachers, and a member of the musical groups before the Liberation in 1945. Although women musicians actively contributed to constructing the early western music culture in colonial Korean society, their emergence and participation have not been considered seriously under the view of androcentric nationalism which emphasizes the collective, social, and national way of music. To attempt to bring up the perspective of gendered history in colonial Korean music culture, this paper explores the published magazine articles written by several professional women musicians. Concurrently with the emergence of expert musical women, their writings and interviews began to be actively published in the form of public magazine articles since the middle of the 1920s. The magazine articles provide in detail the vivid life condition that colonial Korean women musicians experienced. This paper first examines the educational background for the birth of a new type of musical woman and illustrates the different kinds of musical careers they engaged in the public sphere: a concert, a school, a church, and associations. Later, it focuses on their magazine articles which take on the character of personal anecdotes to understand the life and experience of women musicians. By examining the articles, I attempt to analyze the gendered aspects of women musicians’ writings in common; new woman, subjectivity, and domesticity. Through this paper, I argue to reconsider the importance of gendered characteristics in not only constructing the early Korean musical culture but also emerging a new specific model of musical woman, which affects Korean society until now.

Given music reflects reality of an era, revealing the history of music criticism enables us to understand not only musical works but also their sociocultural contexts. It is especially important to investigate music criticism of the Colonial Chosun because it implies various aspects of social, political, cultural and educational situations under the Japanese rule. Until early 1900s, music was generally considered as a part of entertainment in Chosun. In other words, music was a sort of amusement. After all, western music and culture have been absorbed for about 100 years, which further has changed a perception of music in Korea. Intellectuals introduced western music as a part of western arts and culture that Koreans ought to follow, which has moved a status of music from an entertainment to an art. As a result, Western music, especially literate music learning by rote, became a class of culture whereas Chosun music was degraded. With a title of music critics, intellectuals published their writings on exotic music and famous music by great composers to newspapers and magazines that had strong influence on modernization of the public. Following intellectuals experience, people imagined western music and established their stereotypes of western music with few visual illustrations. It shows that music criticism is responsible not only for critique but also for an establishment of music culture. This study will contributes to better understanding on the history of western music reception in the context of the colonial era, which further explains how current music culture in Korea is centered on Western music.

Taiwanese American Chichun Chi-sun Lee is a freelance composer who resides in Seoul, South Korea. She was the first Taiwanese composer to be commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and she was also commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, in both 2001 and 2018. Additionally, Lee received the prestigious Guggenheim Fellow in 2015. These great honors prove that she was approaching a milestone of a successful composition career. However, COVID-19, which has affected all universally, breaks her routine to succeed in her carrier as a composer who inevitably requires social gathering for rehearsal, practice, and live performance. This paper demonstrates how Chichun Chi-sun Lee as a freelancer composer overcame the worldwide lockdown via COVID-19 and created her musical pieces during the last two years. She has turned the crisis into opportunities and took advantage of technologies to communicate much globally without physical restriction. Moreover, pandemic gave her a chance to look at the issues in globalized society under the microscope. She shares what she has produced during the last two years through experiences in her native country Taiwan which has successfully prevented COVID-19 but is still alienated from global society, fraught elections and politicizing in the US, and multi-local traditional folk music and plays she has found through digital media.