Korean music before and after the West

Abstract

It is argued that a historically informed approach to the study of Oceania facilitates the understanding of how Oceanian and European cultures were both respectively and mutually shaped by centuries of cross-cultural contact and exchange. Recent scholarship on Oceania's networks of knowledge and culture obviates the need to reconstruct forgotten forms of musical practice or trace strands of musical dissemination and appropriation. Encounter music marked a new aural occurrence in the soundscapes of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century voyagers and islanders, and it impacted the social relations and power dynamics of the transacting parties. Music and dance constituted an important aspect of Oceanian voyaging: sea songs, fiddle tunes, and hornpipes provided exercise and recreation for European sailors and officers during long passages at sea. Western assumptions about the social and public character of music are confounded by notions of ownership, restricted audience, and secrecy prevalent in parts of Oceania.