Japan and Korea
Recommended Books
The recommended books below include reference works and books on several topics related to Japanese and Korean music. Most books on the traditional music of Japan can be found in ML 340 while popular music is in ML 3501. Most books on the traditional music of Korea, likewise, can be found in ML 342 while its popular music is in ML 3502. For additional results, run the subject searches Music -- Japan and Music -- Korea. Books are sorted by their call numbers for ease of browsing. Hover over the info icon to see a description.
The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, Volume 7: East Asia: China, Japan, and Korea by
This volume explores not only the close ties that link the cultures and musics of East and Northeast Asia, but also the distinctive features that separate them.
Call Number: ML100 .G16 1998 V.7 and Music OnlinePublication Date: 2001
The Ashgate Research Companion to Japanese Music by
Music is a frequently neglected aspect of Japanese culture. It is in fact a highly problematic area, as the Japanese actively introduced Western music into their modern education system in the Meiji period (1868-1911), creating westernized melodies and instrumental instruction for Japanese children from kindergarten upwards. As a result, most Japanese now have a far greater familiarity with Western (or westernized) music than with traditional Japanese music. Traditional or classical Japanese music has become somewhat ghettoized, often known and practised only by small groups of people in social structures which have survived since the pre-modern era. Such marginalization of Japanese music is one of the less recognized costs of Japan's modernization. On the other hand, music in its westernized and modernized forms has an extremely important place in Japanese culture and society, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, being so widely known and performed that it is arguably part of contemporary Japanese popular and mass culture. Japan has become a world leader in the mass production of Western musical instruments and in innovative methodologies of music education (Yamaha and Suzuki). More recently, the Japanese craze of karaoke as a musical entertainment and as musical hardware has made an impact on the leisure and popular culture of many countries in Asia, Europe and the Americas. This is the first book to cover in detail all genres including court music, Buddhist chant, theatre music, chamber ensemble music and folk music, as well as contemporary music and the connections between music and society in various periods. The book is a collaborative effort, involving both Japanese and English speaking authors, and was conceived by the editors to form a balanced approach that comprehensively treats the full range of Japanese musical culture.
Call Number: ML340 .A84 2008Publication Date: 2008
Six Hidden Views of Japanese Music by
The author, Professor of Music at the University of Michigan and Director of the Stearns Collection of Musical Instruments, is a specialist in Japanese music and their instruments. In this book he discusses the art of ko tsuzumi drum making and drum lessons; general principles of Japanese music; Shakkyo; Kanda matsuri; Horai; and two Noh plays.
Call Number: ML340 .M34 1986Publication Date: 1986
Music in Japan: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture by
Music in Japan is one of several case-study volumes that can be used along with Thinking Musically, the core book in the Global Music Series. Thinking Musically incorporates music from many diverse cultures and establishes the framework for exploring the practice of music around the world. Itsets the stage for an array of case-study volumes, each of which focuses on a single area of the world. Each case study uses the contemporary musical situation as a point of departure, covering historical information and traditions as they relate to the present. Visit www.oup.com/us/globalmusic fora list of case studies in the Global Music Series. The website also includes instructional materials to accompany each study.Music in Japan offers a vivid introduction to the music of contemporary Japan, a nation in which traditional, Western, and popular music thrive side by side. Drawing on more than forty years of experience, author Bonnie C. Wade focuses on three themes throughout the book and in the musicalselections on the accompanying CD. She begins by exploring how music in Japan has been profoundly affected by interface with both the Western (Europe and the Americas) and Asian (continental and island) cultural spheres. Wade then shows how Japan's thriving popular music industry is also a modernform of a historically important facet of Japanese musical culture: the process of gradual popularization, in which a local or a group's music eventually becomes accessible to a broader range of people. She goes on to consider the intertextuality of Japanese music: how familiar themes, musicalsounds, and structures have been maintained and transformed across the various traditions of Japanese performing arts over time.Music in Japan is enhanced by eyewitness accounts of performances, interviews with key performers, and vivid illustrations. Packaged with an 80-minute CD containing examples of the music discussed in the book, it features guided listening and hands-on activities that encourage readers toengage actively and critically with the music.
Call Number: ML340 .W22 2005Publication Date: 2005
Music in Korea: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture by
Despite its longstanding position as a distinct cultural force in East Asia, Korea continues to be underrepresented in world music texts. Music in Korea is the first brief, single-volume text to provide a thematic, succinct introduction to the music of Korea--a region whose volatile political climate has often overshadowed its rich cultural and musical traditions. Based on author Donna Lee Kwon's extensive fieldwork, the text features interviews with performers, eyewitness accounts of performances, and vivid illustrations. Kwon uses three themes--Korea as a transnational player in East Asia, the intersection of Korean music and cultural politics, and Korea's maintenance of its strong cultural identity through both musical and aesthetic continuity--to survey the region and draw parallels and contrasts between its various traditions.
Call Number: ML342 .K867 2012Publication Date: 2012
In Search of Korean Traditional Opera: Discourses of Chʻanggŭk by
This is the first book on Korean opera in a language other than Korean. Its subject is ch'angguk, a form of musical theater that has developed over the last hundred years from the older narrative singing tradition of p'ansori. Andrew Killick examines the history and current practice of ch'angguk as an ongoing attempt to invent a traditional Korean opera form to compare with those of neighboring China and Japan. In this, the work addresses a growing interest within the fields of ethnomusicology and Asian studies in the adaptation of traditional arts to conditions in the modern world.
Call Number: ML1751.K7 K54 2010Publication Date: 2010
K-Pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia Performance by
1990s South Korea saw the transition from a military dictatorship to a civilian government, from a manufacturing economy to a postindustrial hub, and from a cloistered society to a more dynamic transnational juncture. These seismic shifts had a profound impact on the media industry and the rise of K-pop. In K-pop Live, Suk-Young Kim investigates the meteoric ascent of Korean popular music in relation to the rise of personal technology and social media, situating a feverish cross-media partnership within the Korean historical context and broader questions about what it means to be "live" and "alive." Based on in-depth interviews with K-pop industry personnel, media experts, critics, and fans, as well as archival research, K-pop Live explores how the industry has managed the tough sell of live music in a marketplace in which virtually everything is available online. Teasing out digital media's courtship of "liveness" in the production and consumption of K-pop, Kim investigates the nuances of the affective mode in which human subjects interact with one another in the digital age. Observing performances online, in concert, and even through the use of holographic performers, Kim offers readers a step-by-step guide through the K-pop industry's variegated efforts to diversify media platforms as a way of reaching a wider global network of music consumers. In an era when digital technology inserts itself into nearly all social relationships, Kim reveals how "what is live" becomes a question of how we exist as increasingly mediated subjects, fragmented and isolated by technological wonders while also longing for a sense of belonging and being alive through an interactive mode of exchange we often call "live."
Call Number: ML3502.K6 K577 2018Publication Date: 2018
K-Pop: Popular Music, Cultural Amnesia, and Economic Innovation in South Korea by
K-Pop: Popular Music, Cultural Amnesia, and Economic Innovation in South Korea seeks at once to describe and explain the emergence of export-oriented South Korean popular music and to make sense of larger South Korean economic and cultural transformations. John Lie provides not only a history of South Korean popular music--the premodern background, Japanese colonial influence, post-Liberation American impact, and recent globalization--but also a description of K-pop as a system of economic innovation and cultural production. In doing so, he delves into the broader background of South Korea in this wonderfully informed history and analysis of a pop culture phenomenon sweeping the globe.
Call Number: ML3502.K7 L54 2015Publication Date: 2015
Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan by
Japan's jazz community--both musicians and audience--has been begrudgingly recognized in the United States for its talent, knowledge, and level of appreciation. Underpinning this tentative admiration, however, has been a tacit agreement that, for cultural reasons, Japanese jazz "can't swing." In Blue Nippon, E. Taylor Atkins shows how, strangely, Japan's own attitude toward jazz is founded on this same ambivalence about its authenticity. Engagingly told through the voices of many musicians, Blue Nippon explores the true and legitimate nature of Japanese jazz. With its depiction of jazz as a transforming global phenomenon, Blue Nippon will make enjoyable reading not only for jazz fans worldwide but also for ethnomusicologists, and students of cultural studies, Asian studies, and modernism.
Call Number: ML3509.J3 A85 2001Publication Date: 2001
P'ungmul: South Korean Drumming and Dance by
Composed of a core set of two drums and two gongs, p'ungmul is a South Korean tradition of rural folk percussion. Steeped in music, dance, theater, and pageantry, but centrally focused on rhythm, such ensembles have been an integral part of village life in South Korea for centuries, serving as a musical accompaniment in the often overlapping and shifting contexts of labor, ritual, and entertainment. The first book to introduce Korean drumming and dance to the English-speaking world, Nathan Hesselink's P'ungmul offers detailed descriptions of its instrumentation, dance formations, costuming, actors, teaching lineages, and the complexities of training. Hesselink also evaluates how this tradition has taken on new roles and meanings in the twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, investigating the interrelated yet contested spheres of history, memory, government policy, grassroots politics, opportunities for musical transmission, and performance practices and aesthetics. P'ungmul offers those interested in ethnomusicology, world music, anthropology, sociology, and Asian studies a special glimpse into the inner workings of a historically rich, artistically complex, and aesthetically and aurally beautiful Korean musical and dance tradition.
Call Number: ML3752.7.C5 H47 2006Publication Date: 2006
Composing for Japanese Instruments by
The unique sounds of the biwa, shamisen, and other traditional instruments from Japan are heard more and more often in works for the concert hall and opera house. Composing for Japanese Instruments is a practical orchestration/instrumentation manual with contextual and relevant historical information for composers who wish to learn how to compose for traditional Japanese instruments. Widely regarded as the authoritative text on the subject in Japan and China, it contains hundreds of musical examples, diagrams, photographs, and fingering charts, and comes complete with two accompanying compact discs of musical examples.
Call Number: MT58 .M5513 2008Publication Date: 2008
Interlibrary Loan
Users are encouraged to search for items beyond University Libraries' catalog via RILM Abstracts of Music Literature and WorldCat. Materials not available in print or online may be requested through Interlibrary Loan. Please allow up to seven days for electronic delivery and up to fourteen days for delivery of physical items.