BETWEEN GLOBAL AND LOCAL: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY KOREAN MUSIC-MAKING

This paper examines the relationship between trends in world culture and contemporary Korean music. The discourse of globalization concerns not only politics and economics, but social and cultural dimensions, and cultural globalization is deeply influencing the performing arts all over the world. One such manifestation of this influence is the genre of 'world music'. World music was developed in the West as a new commercial genre in the 1980s and was introduced to Korea in the 1990s, anticipating the arrival of a new Korean cultural wave. Since then the term 'world music' has been employed in Korea itself, producing a new world music discourse unique to Korea. In this article, I raise the following inter-related questions: What is the meaning of cultural globalization for local Korean music? In what ways does globalization change the local musical scene? Does globalization weaken locality? Will globalization lead to a rapid homogenization of the musics and cultures of the world? In order to answer these questions, I begin with a theoretical discussion of cultural globalization, pointing out some of the effects of globalization on Korean music, as well as some of the strategies suggested for dealing with globalization, and discourses related to the issue. I hope to reveal some of the ways in which Korean musicians understand and define globalization and world music as well as how Korean music participates in the process of cultural globalization. This article investigates how the discourses of globalization and 'world music-ization' of traditional Korean music are constructed by Korean musicians, based on critical writings, newspaper reports, advertisements, report data and interviews.