The Center for Korean Studies Presents:

Fall 2020 Korean Studies Colloquium Series:

Beauty of the Unbearable:

Aesthetics in Female Korean Southwestern Folksong Performance

10/28 (Wed), 2:30 pm  

    Speaker

Hilary Vanessa Finchum-Sung (Ph.D. Indiana University) is a specialist in Korean music theory and performance practice. Her academic training is in both ethnomusicology and East Asian Studies. An ethnomusicologist by trade, Finchum-Sung spent a decade in the Republic of Korea where she made history as the first and only  non-Korean to have served as faculty in a Department of Korean Music. She has published in academic journals such as Ethnomusicology, the world of music (new series), Seoul Journal of Korean Studies and Acta Koreana. Her research interests include sustainable folk music practice, women and performance, and globalization of Korean music.

Event Description

Folk song and instrumental folk genres have been tied to local identities and aesthetics developed over time. The musical sounds of Korea’s southwestern regions typically present a powerful, intense, and sorrowful character. The presentation will explore the aesthetics of southwestern folksong, in particular, the ways by which female performers use melodic and narrative tropes to evoke individual, community, and regional identities and to reassert their positioning and relationships with others. By examining recontextualization and reinterpretation of southwestern folksong in contemporary South Korea, the presentation touches on the ways by which concepts of genre and related expressivities transform in accordance with societal transformations and the human relationships therein.

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