Crossover between Jazz and Korean Traditional Music within the Ideological Context of "Expansion of Tradition"

Since the late 20th century, plenty of collaborative works among Korean traditional musicians and jazz performers have emerged in the realm of “changjak gugak (lit. creative national music).” In 2020s, within the scene of traditional music-based crossover works, “elite” jazz musicians’ active participation and the use of musical elements of jazz music have become more and more visible. During the same period, the discourses of “expansion,” “popularization,” and/or “modernization” of tradition has constantly circulated and consumed as a bundle of “spirit of the times.” Those discourses became intertwined together and thereby produced and reproduced two differentiated ideological time-spaces of “gugak musicians and listeners-premodern era-oldness-Korean (traditional) culture/music” and “the public(laymen)-modern times-newness-Western culture/music.” Because of these ideological frames, a variety of new gugak-jazz works constructed by a set of conventionalized and oft-outdated jazz performance skills and composing styles are often automatically categorized as examples of “musical expansion/modernization/ popularization” of traditional music that offer new kinds of experience, Many of those gugak-jazz crossover works which are totally not new in terms of artistic device are represented as new things “inertially” due to this existence of state-driven ideological discourses that semiotically connect the Western music to newness, which result in the crossover musicians’ benefit from the gugak-related financial aid programs offered by the state. Those discourses often ideologically dominate traditional music performers and related participants, thus the established style of gugak pieces with jazz-related elements are introduced as a “new expansion” of traditional music by musicians themselves as well as gugak-related mass media. This paper critically argues that such discursive convention that often unfairly elevates all kinds of gugak-jazz crossover works should be reconsidered and productively deconstructed for better understanding and critic of crossover gugak works.