김순애의 가곡: 구상(具象)에서 추상(抽象)으로

Abstract

Kim Soon-ae (1920-2007), credited as the first female composer of Korea, completed extensive compositional training at Ewha (1937-1941) and Eastman Music School (1955-1956). With support from the UNESCO Fellowship, she also traveled widely in Europe to observe the musical scene in the early part of the 1960s. Kim learned complex musical languages of Europe and composed large-scale orchestral pieces with modern expressions. However, she chose a 'simple' musical genre, a Korean lyric style called Kagok, as her focus and wrote a total of about 100 pieces. Her kagok written for Korean poems are well received publicly, primarily because the music and lyrics seem to reflect the Korean spirit and portray a sense of culture and heritage. While her songs, especially earlier ones, are still loved by the general public, Kim seems to be forgotten in the minds of the Korean people. In the scholarship of 20th-century Korean music, she is recognized as the first-generation composer of Korea; however, her composition, which span a period of 60 years, have not been seriously studied. "Nationalism" and "modernization" are considered by Korean musicologists to be the two most significant aspects characterizing the 20th-century sociocultural scene of Korea. These aspects are not properly discussed with regard to her works. This paper discusses Kim's significant contribution to the development of Korean music in the 20th century based on an analysis of her extensive published articles on both subjects and unpublished kagok peices written since the 1970s. She not only advocated the necessity of having a distinct musical identity free from the dominance of Western influences but also demonstrated how complex emotions could be reflected in music and poetic lyrics.