Music of Korea

Catalog description

Taking modern Korea as a case study, this course will explore frameworks for thinking about social, economic, and political processes through music and sound. Topics examined include musics of diaspora and migration, ASMR and mediated intimacy, contemporary returns of sacred and ritual art, the social politics of voice, song and political memory, the politics of creative labor, culture’s margins, and more. In each of these thematic areas, we will take up the question of how encounters with music influence (or fail to influence) our knowledge and experience of processes commonly conceived as lying outside of the domain of culture. While our materials will focus on examples from modern Korea, our discussions will necessarily take us to discuss the same topics in other parts of the world, and students will be encouraged to take up questions and themes and apply them to contexts beyond Korea in their individual work. No prior musical knowledge or proficiency in the Korean language is required.