Korea

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“Traversing Chosŏn Society through Music”

Please join us for a special performance by: Gamin Kang, piri, saenghwang and taepyeongso soloist

Followed by Q&A with Hye Eun Choi, Visiting Scholar, Columbia University

About the performer: Gamin Kang, simply known as “gamin,” a distinguished NYC soloist, tours the world performing both traditional Korean music and cross-disciplinary collaborations. Born in Seoul, gamin received her B.A. (1998) and Doctor of Musical Arts (2016) in Korean music from Seoul National University. Gamin plays piri (double reed Korean oboe), taepyeonso (double-reed horn), and saenghwang (mouth organ). She is a designated Yisuja, official holder of Important Intangible Cultural Asset No. 46 for Court and Royal Military music. Gamin was second principal piri player at National Gugak Orchestra, 2004-10.

Re-inventing new sonorities from ancient, somewhat restrictive, musical systems, gamin has received several cultural exchange program grants, including Artist-in-Residence (2014) at the Asian Cultural Council, Rockefeller U., and Ministry of Culture, Sports, Tourism of Republic of Korea (2012). She has presented lecture/concerts at Harvard and Dartmouth, and in Paris, Strasbourg, and Freiburg. Gamin has collaborated in cross-cultural improvisation in NYC with world-acclaimed musician Jane Ira Bloom, presenting premieres at Roulette Theater, New School, and Metropolitan Museum, NYC. Gamin was featured artist at the Silkroad concert, Seoul, 2018, performing on-stage with Yo-Yo Ma.

In addition to 5 CD’s, gamin digitally released “Attraction,” traditional solo music for piri. All About Jazz (2014) praised “…the most haunting track, the elegiac Jeongseon Arirang, played by gamin on piri…” Gamin’s latest recording comprises improvs with today’s most innovative musicians, including Ned Rothenberg. Gamin premiered her newest solos, performed by Korea Symphony (2016), Seoul Philharmonic (2015), and National Gugak Orchestra (2019).
Gamin was visiting scholar at James Joo-Jin Kim Program in Korean Studies, U. of Pennsylvania, 2018.

Closing out 2019, gamin will be Artist-in-Residence at Brandeis U., and continue her tour to Mexico City, Berlin, and Seoul. In March 2020, gamin will perform her Carnegie Hall début with the Nangye Gugak Orchestra.

This is a Center for Korean Research Arts and Culture Event. No registration required.

For press inquiries, please contact Ariana King ak4364@columbia.edu.
Cosponsored by: The Academy of Korean Studies, Seoul Korea; Columbia Alumni Association, Korea; the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, The Department of Music.

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“Citizen Newspaper Advertisements in Contemporary South Korea: Analogue Protest Media in the Age of the Internet”

 

Please join us for a lecture with: Olga Fedorenko, Associate Professor, Seoul National University

Center for Korean Research Colloquium

Moderated by: Theodore Hughes, Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Humanities and Director of The Center for Korean Research, Columbia University.

Description: As South Korea geared for the thirteen weeks of protests that would eventually impeach the corrupt president Park Geun-hye (2013-2017), it also witnessed a proliferation of a new kind of activist image. They were full- or half-page opinion advertisements in the mainstream newspapers, paid with individual citizens’ donations coordinated via civic organizations or social media. During the first month of protest, over a dozen of such ads—by alumni associations, churches, and other civic groups—appeared just in the two biggest left-leaning dailies. It was puzzling to encounter those newspaper ads in twenty-first-century South Korea, where newspaper readership had plunged years ago and wi-fi and smartphones are ubiquitous. Often the ads reproduced the slogans from the downtown demonstrations, but their most striking visual element was the printed names of the ad donors, which appeared in small font as a background—sometimes up to eight thousand of them. This paper explores the performative efficacy of such activist images. Specifically I argue that it was the spatial presence of the words on the newspaper page, particularly of the citizen donors’ names—their embodied visuality— that made those ads a locally meaningful protest practice. My analysis foregrounds the physical presence of analogue media in space and teases out its implications for protest. Exploring the symbiosis of the digital and analogue that powered those citizens’ ads, the paper contributes to the scholarly conversation on how the Internet has remediated traditional media locally and globally.

This is a Center for Korean Research Lectures and Panels event. No registration required.

For press inquiries, please contact Ariana King ak4364@columbia.edu.

Cosponsored by: The Academy of Korean Studies, Seoul Korea; Columbia Alumni Association, Korea; the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures

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CKR Colloquium: “Songs for the ‘Great Leaders’: Ideology and Political Agitation in the Music of North Korea”

“Songs for the ‘Great Leaders’: Ideology and Political Agitation in the Music of North Korea”

Keith Howard, Fellow of the National Humanities Center, North Carolina and Professor Emeritus at SOAS, University of London

Moderated by Charles K. Armstrong, Korea Foundation Professor of the Korean Studies in the Social Sciences in the Department of History

Tuesday, 17 April 2018
4:00 PM
International Affairs Building, Room 918
No Registration Required

Songs have, for more than 70 years, taken a central role in North Korean cultural production. They form the dominant soundscape, reflecting ideology, whether in Soviet-inspired revolutionary songs of the first decade of North Korea’s existence, in the Chinese-inspired incorporation of folksongs into nationalist discourse in the second decade, or in more recent state-sanctioned pop. Songs mark political transitions: they function as newspaper editorials, promoting new policies and underpinning the monolithic unity of the leaders, the party and the people. Under North Korea’s juche ideology, ‘seeds’ are implanted in the lyrics and in the leitmotifs of songs. Songs are then recast in multiple forms to increase the penetration of the ‘seed’. They become background music, festival music, and the music of mass games: the message remains even when lyrics are replaced by instrumental or orchestral arrangements. This seminar provides an overview, then zooms in on two periods of leadership transition – from Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il in 1994-1997, and from Kim Jong Il to Kim Jong Un in 2009-2011 – to explore the politicization of song culture. I offer brief comparisons to Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Karimov’s Uzbekistan and Assad’s Syria, but argues that North Korea has gone further than anywhere else in embedding songs into the fabric of the theatre of daily life.

Bio:

Professor Keith Howard is a Fellow of the National Humanities Center, North Carolina. He is Professor Emeritus at SOAS, University of London, and was formerly Professor and Associate Dean at the University of Sydney. He has written or edited 20 books and 150 academic articles. He has been a regular broadcaster on Korean affairs for BBC, ITV, Sky, NBC and others. He was editorial chair for the SOAS Musicology Series (Ashgate/Routledge) for nine years (2008–2017), and founded and managed the SOASIS CD and DVD series as well as OpenAir Radio. He serves on the boards of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, International Council for Traditional Music, and sits on editorial boards for Music Theory Spectrum, Asian Ethnology, Papers of the British Association for Korean Studies and OMNES.

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