Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie (Jan 2012)
Musikalisches Zitat als kulturelle Assoziation. Die ästhetische Bedeutung des musikalischen Zitats in der koreanischen Musik des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts
Abstract
Musical quotation, as a technique of using the pre-existing materials in the music composition, has an important significance in both quantitative and qualitative aspects since the late 20th century, as can be seen from works of Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Luciano Berio, Mauricio Kagel, Alfred Schnittke, George Rochberg, George Crumb. In terms of aesthetics, the musical quotation is closely related with postmodernism as the technique deviates from the aesthetics of originality and reveals musical diversity. In this respect, it can be said that ›musical quotation‹ is an important keyword which describes the late 20th century. In this paper, by extending this perspective into the East Asia with a particular focus on South Korea, the musical quotation was investigated. Since the Western music was first introduced into South Korea in the late 19th century, various types of it have been combined in the country to produce works with a wide variety of musical forms and styles. Among these, works of Na, Un Young (1922–1993), Kang, Unsu (*1960), and Chung, Tae Bong (*1952) who employed the technique of musical quotation in their compositions were examined in detail here. Through this study, quotations in Korean music were found to play a semantic role in revealing the cultural context, similar to the West. However, several differences were found as well. First of all, there are only a few works with the quotation technique employed by Korean composers, probably due to the prevailing influence of the modernist aesthetics yet in Korea. Moreover, it is noteworthy that in Korean works, quoted targets were often selected from musical elements which were very familiar to Korean cultural ones. In this respect, the quotation technique which has been shown to embody not only culture and human, but also history and society, plays a significant role in reflecting the identity as a Korean composer.
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