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Mixing of Genres in Korean Popular Music during the 1930s: With a focus on “jazzsong”

Soyoung Lee 1

1한국학중앙연구원

Candidate

ABSTRACT

This paper looks into the musical traits of the “jazzsong” genre of the 1930s, and how it mixed with other existing genres such as trot and shinminyo(new folk song). Until recently, jazzsong was understood to be adaptations of Western popular songs that were not completely Japanized. In this paper, I analyzed several jazzsong pieces written by Korean composers to highlight the musical characteristics of the genre, and looked into how jazzsong merged with the musical grammar of trot(yuhaengga) and shinminyo that had already undergone the process of localization. First, in the case of jazzsongs written by Korean composers, the melody of the pentatonic scale were written and arranged in the big-band style of early jazz music. This contrasts with the fact that most adapted foreign jazz pieces were written in the diatonic scale. Second, since the late 1930s, blues became popular as a sub-genre of jazzsong, and it is evident that the lamenting tone of the blues leaned in many aspects to trot’s mode and melodramatic mood. Third, there existed a musical style that combined the shinminyo’s grammar and jazz’s style. Minyo’s mode and beat coexisted with major-minor mode, merging with the jazz style. This can be regarded as the mixing of shinminyo and jazz. As such, the mixing of jazz with other genres can be understood to be a result of the attempts to localize jazz which was perceived to be relatively new and unfamiliar compared to trot or shinminyo, which were already popular to the public. It can be regarded as acculturation of jazz to be settled and localized within Korean popular music.

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* References for papers published after 2024 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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