Managing Difference: The Ideology of Choral Singing in the Christian Korean Diaspora

• In Event: Korea in Motion: Shifting Sounds and Cultural Identifications in Transnational, Multiethnic Korea

Abstract

The Korean diaspora in Southern California in general owes its formation to the convergence of Christianity, U.S.-bounded immigration, and Cold-War politics in Korea, and has been a symbolic sector of Korean Christianity since the Korean War. This presentation investigates how Korean American practitioners of Christian choral music respond to recent changes in music styles, particularly those that reflect a departure from an Euro-American framework. It explores the reception of divergent music styles among a Korean-language church choir in Orange County in the context of rehearsals. The choir I worked with is part of a Korean-language church of approximately 500 members who live in the area. I worked with this choir for from 2008 to 2010 as the choir’s piano accompanist and developed close relationships with the choir singers, many of whom are in their 50s and 60s. This presentation, based on an ethnography of choir rehearsals, documents the diasporic singers’ resistant responses to neotraditional styles—styles that incorporate elements of traditional Korean music within Euro-American musical framework—and engages these responses through interviews, which often touch on the singers’ lived experiences and memories of their emigration during the 1960s and 1970s. My analysis begins from the following question: what does it mean for a generation of Korean diasporic subjects—whose musical values have been shaped by the remembered and lived experiences of U.S. Protestant missionization, Japanese imperialism, and the U.S. military occupation of South Korea—to adopt an ethnicized Protestant music? I conclude that the singers’ unsympathetic responses to these pieces stem from an entrenched desire to identify with music styles that have come to signify “being” in a temporal space after South Korea’s nationwide suffering.

Author

• Hyun Kyong Hannah Chang, Ewha Womans University