The Authenticity of "Court Music": Studies of Korean Music by Japanese Musicologists in the Colonial Period

• In Event: The Diaspora of Beauty and the Remaking of Korean Traditional Aesthetics in 1910-1945

Abstract

Korean traditional music, which had remained within its national border, was exposed to modern academic scrutiny by Japanese musicologists in the colonial period. Away from Confucian theories of music, Kanetsune Kiyosuke (1885-1957), Tanabe Hisao (1883-1984), and Ishikawa Giichi (1877-1962) employed, along with fieldwork, modern/comparative musicological approaches to Korean traditional music. In the 1910s, Kanetsume suggested that Korean traditional music contained a “beauty of formality” while Tanabe, who conducted a series of intensive fieldwork in Korea in the 1920s, discovered in Korean traditional music what he determined authentic elements of ancient Chinese “court music.” Tanabe called for preservation of ancient “court music” inherited in Korea – a legacy of archaic ritual music that had long been lost in many parts of the Chinese cultural circle. Tanabe, who wrote a comprehensive history of Oriental music, exerted influence upon a modern generation of Korean musicologists who endeavored to center Korean music on the tradition of “court music.” The aesthetic framework of Korean music which Tanabe proposed was later incorporated into the ways in which Korean musicologists perceived their own musical tradition. On the other hand, Ishikawa composed a number of music pieces that accommodated some scores of Korean court music he collected in Korea in the 1930s. Interestingly, Korean musicologists did not much appreciate the scores of Korean court music which Ishikawa had collected, but his endeavor enlightened the musicologists to the importance of taking the repertoires of court music down in modern musical notation – the awakening that helped, to a great extent, the Koreans cherish and preserve their traditional music.

Author

• Yukio Uemura, Tokyo University of the Arts