Toop on Musical Conservatism

[delladanza]

Today while walking home from work, I was reading the new issue of The Wire (# 261) and in the Epiphanies section on the back page I see a really fascinating article on Korean music. The subject was particularly appropriate because recently I had made a Korean "folk" music and had tackled very similar ideas/problems in constructing it

Comments

[laozi]

I say absofuckinglutely to his last paragraph!

For her, this was an art form that had failed to adapt to contemporary conditions and so exists only as a museum piece.

This experience parallels my own over here in South Korea: I find myself discovering an incredibly rich, passionate, and complex goldmine of traditional music and spiritual practices, and the response that I have gotten from every single Korean (and I'm not exaggerating here; I really do mean every. single. Korean.) who I have tried to engage in discussion on the topic falls somewhere between bored indifference and outright shame of the tradition- shame that sometimes even translates into veiled hostility towards me. I've never found myself offended by this; I understand how complicated it is to examine the traditions and heritage of one's own culture (I have a very complicated relationship with American folk music, for that matter). Nevertheless, I do get frustrated. It seems to be a big point in Korean culture today that those parts of its history that have not found