I thought about the cultural context in which music has developed in Korea, and why traditional Korean music has not developed. In this article, I will briefly discuss both.

Korea existed under the name Joseon until 1910. During the Joseon Dynasty, there was a unique culture that was created over many years, including language and music. Unfortunately, this culture was suppressed and lost in the name of cultural control when Korea was colonised by Japan in 1910. Fortunately, the language and some of the culture was preserved, but there was no further development. This was no different after the country gained independence from Japanese colonial rule at the end of World War II on 15 August 1945, due to the ideological conflict of Korean politicians between democracy and communism and the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, which led to the Korean War in 1950. Since the country was divided into North and South Korea after the armistice in 1953, the country has developed through a radical embrace of Western culture, with admiration for the United States, which had helped the country militarily, progressing into mercantilism. At that time, Korea’s national financial condition was at its worst, and in order to solve this problem, the people worked hard and gradually began to overcome financially by sticking together. During this time, the art scene in Korea suffered a major blow culturally, not because of government suppression, but because the people themselves began to consider art as a luxury. At that time, Korean people needed productive work, and art, which was quite far from productivity, was not considered necessary. This led to the development of light-hearted pop and commercial music over fine art, and even some fine artists such as Nam June Paik chose to work abroad rather than in Korea. Today, Korean culture such as K-pop is on the rise worldwide, but it is clear that fine and traditional arts are not being developed. Korean traditional music is also not growing in this context, and there are actually several major problems.

First of all, as mentioned above, Korean traditional music has not been developed for nearly 100 years due to the fall of Joseon, and a large part of it was lost due to colonial rule. However, this is not the only problem: Korean traditional music can be broadly categorised into royal and folk music, and since most of the folk music was transmitted orally without sheet music, much of it was lost during the 40 years of cultural disconnection, and court music is difficult to resonate with the public.

Nevertheless, in recent years, a musical genre called crossover, in which modern popular music is performed on national instruments, has emerged as a new avenue for Korean traditional music. This is a device that makes Korean traditional music more acceptable to Korean audiences, but it also raises the question of whether it can be called traditional music at all. The idea of whether we can call it traditional music simply because it uses traditional instruments will be discussed further in the next blog post.