Introduction to the Special Section Music That Moves: Sonic Narratives in Modern Korea

Abstract

Introduction to the Special Section Music That Moves:Sonic Narratives in Modern Korea Dafna Zur (bio) and Susan Hwang (bio) The starting place for the papers in this special section is music. Music is not bound to material forms as is painting and sculpture or to language like literature and poetry. It travels as waves with kinetic energy through space. Music is governed by organizational principles, to be sure, but the porosity of its delivery and the purported universality of its form—no prior knowledge is required to experience it—makes music one of the most effective conveyors of human emotion. The study of Korean popular music has expanded substantially in recent years and has been informed by trends in two areas of scholarship. The first area is that of the "popular"; scholarship in this area has illuminated everyday life as a key site for critical engagement with mass media.1 The other area can be broadly categorized as "K-pop studies"; this scholarship takes stock of popular culture in transnational forms that manifest in multimedia spectacles, global fandom, and mass performances.2 These two groundswells have created a veritable golden age of popular culture studies, and have brought into relief the extent to which the [End Page 1] textual, visual, and sonic aspects of popular culture hold potent political power of both local and global proportions. At the same time, the recent surge of interest in contemporary popular culture has been bracketed by disciplinary boundaries around fields such as musicology, media studies, literature, political science, and history. Boundaries tend to make it more difficult to engage with popular culture from multi-disciplinary perspectives. This special section of Korean Studies proposes to challenge such boundaries. Our papers demonstrate that there is much to be gained by attending to ways that the sonic and the verbal, as well as the aural and the visual, intersect and interact. Each in their own way, the authors of this special section argue that music's nonverbal capacity to reach broad audiences can carry words, feelings, and objects into diverse spaces. In the process, music and the words it carries may galvanize people in acts of protest or acts of complicity; it may foster a sense of collective belonging or heighten feelings of alienation; or it may drive people to engage in new acts of social or material exchange. The six papers of the special section consider the following questions: how can a fresh framing of music help us rethink the relationship between the textual and the musical, between literacy and orality, between the nation and the people, and between the written and the performative? What kind of attention can we draw to these relationships, as both sides of such binaries get realigned when the nation and capital emerge as organizing principles? The papers consider the ways narrative and music are implicated intertextually and transnationally, and they examine how aesthetic modes both push towards and pull free of the gravity of the nation. The wide range of the papers, which cover the colonial period to the twenty-first century, allows for a dynamic engagement with the shifting politics of music and sound. By "politics" we mean the ways in which music and sound are mobilized to produce, reassert, or challenge membership in imagined communities (colonized, communist, or anticommunist), anti-state activism, or capitalist consumer societies. Accordingly, the papers in this issue examine music as a discursive site for thinking about the multidimensional ways in which the "people" and the "popular" have been articulated in modern Korea. They demonstrate that at key historical junctures, the "people" and the "popular" reinforced each other to form the ethnonational minjok. At other times, the category of the popular served as a means to engineer a fissure between the people and the nation-state. Rather than taking the "people" or the "popular" as preexisting objects that are knowable and representable, the six papers attend to what we might call "socialities"—namely, the social formations [End Page 2] that emerge through performance and which often lie beyond the overdetermined boundaries of the nation. As the papers demonstrate, popular music was neither a derivative nor a byproduct of mass culture. The auditory...