Conference Agenda

The role of Asia in American contemporary music has gained popularity in the twenty-first
century, reflecting attention to blending experimental aspects of American music with traditional Asian sounds through collaborative composition. This paper articulates the collaboration between American composers and Korean musicians in terms of decentralized authorship of music-making in the global era. Decentralization empowers indigenous and other locals through a critical reconsideration of traditional methods imposed by hegemonic powers (Janz & Yang, 2019). Instead of assuming a conventional musical structure in which composers hold strong authority, decentralized music-making places equal emphasis on the sounds and ideas of composers and performers through the creation of music. Korean musicians possessing a traditional musical background expand their musical horizons through collaborative endeavors with American musicians within American society and vice versa.

This paper presents case study: Jungmori Blues (2021) by American experimentalist Ned Rothenberg and Korean piri player Gamin Kang. Through contemporary discourse analysis, and ethnographic interviews, I argue that these collaborations result in decentralized music creation through entangled interactions and negotiations of musical identities and selfhood. In the piece, which combines traditional Korean sanjo (an improvisational instrumental solo genre) and American blues music, the collaboration between Rothenberg and Kang explores the modern potential of the piri by juxtaposing experimental performance techniques and Korean rhythms. By co-composing and cross-teaching their traditions, these composers experiment with the idiomatical vibratos and improvisational sounds of Korean music. This study aims to complicate power relations in musical composition by shifting away from a composer-centered work (Groth, 2016) and amplifying the role of performer. This less-hierarchical music-making promotes communication between composers and performers, while highlighting the potential for marginalized Asian women to reclaim their voices in American modernity. Finally, this paper proposes a new aesthetic paradigm for trans-Pacific collaborations of Korean musicians and American composers in intercultural discourse, moving beyond orientalism and nationalism.

Gustav Mahler’s mistranslation of Chinese Tang poetry in his Das Lied von der Erde is often re-framed as a poetic transformation across languages and cultures, or an act of modernization. Donald Mitchell, for one, argues that Mahler’s musical “orientalism” is an outward expression of Mahler’s spirit, which is “authentically Chinese” and lies “beneath the layers of varnish and alien languages” (Mitchell 1985, 441).^⁠ While the orientalism manifested primarily through Mahler’s use of pentatonicism in Das Lied has been acknowledged in Anglo-American academy (Draughon 2005; Deruchie 2009), the Chinese reception of Das Lied has yet to be studied, notably the efforts of re-translating Das Lied into Chinese.

In this paper, I first examine the mixed reception of Das Lied in China through the feud between Huang Yuan (1999) and Guo Jianying (1996), and underline how the authors capitalize on the untranslatability embedded in the concept yijing—some mysterious aesthetic quality in art that cannot be pinned down and carried across from one subject to another, but intuited or felt—to sustain fantastical claims about Mahler’s (in)ability to translate the yijing of Chinese poetry into music. After establishing that Mahler’s translation of Chinese poetry is associated with the German colonial act at the turn of the twentieth century (Banks 2023), I analyze retranslations of Das Lied into Mandarin—notably those by conductor Zheng Xiaoying et al.—in aspects of intertextuality, phraseology, and retranslational processes. Through close music analysis and engagement with postcolonial translation theories by Homi Bhabha (2016) and Emily Apter (2006), I argue that by retaining Mahler’s music in retranslating Das Lied, the retranslations exhibit a postcolonial ambivalence—the simultaneous resistance to and embrace of the colonizer—which is already shone through in the mixed reception of Das Lied in China. I conclude by reflecting on how Anglo-American narratives surrounding Das Lied signal a broader issue of Western translational hegemony, and suggesting how theories and methods of translation may be understood as cultural and epistemic techniques in global histories of music.

In 1953, a young Korean composer, Un-yung La (1922-1993), led a listening session of Béla Bartók’s music at a café in the heart of Seoul. The event, one of the first meetings of “the Modern Music Institute of Korea,” commemorated the seventh anniversary of Bartók’s death. Although this gathering is remembered today only by brief newspaper announcements and the pamphlet La prepared, from today’s vantage point, it is one of the most significant moments in art music in South Korea: it represents a transition from the initial acceptance of Western music to cultivating its own musical avant-garde.

This paper illustrates how Un-yung La saw post-tonal music as a solution to a conundrum that plagued Korean composers of the mid-twentieth century. Many Korean composers of the 1950s and 60s who sought to engage with Western art music felt its harmonic and tonal schemes were unfit to express their native sentiments. La, while one of the first Korean composers to embrace modern European music and an ardent supporter of post-tonal music, was also committed to making new music align with Korea’s local and traditional elements, composing with the motto “localize first, modernize later.”

The programs and pamphlets La created for the numerous listening sessions and lectures throughout the 1950s and 60s indicate that he was critical of many of modern European composers such as Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Hindemith, but regarded Bartók as his musical prototype. La advocated Bartók’s integration of Hungarian folk tunes and post-tonal music as the ideal approach for Korean composers to emulate. An analysis of his early music also demonstrates how La brought together his affinity for Korea’s traditional and folk music and his passion for modern European music in a fashion comparable to Bartók’s approach. Though not immediately popular, this view became a force that defined the Korean musical world, especially among the next generation of composers, by the 1970s. This paper therefore shows how La was both a representation of the national sentiments that governed the Korean music world in the post-World War II decades and a catalyst to the rise of avant-garde music in Korea.