Tracing South Korea’s earliest recorded music
Collector of vintage sound recordings says the history starts in the early 1890s
By Cheryl Magnant
When was the first recording of Korean music made? Suk Ji-hoon, who recently earned his master’s degree in Korean Modern History from Yonsei University, has the answer.
He traces the early history of recording music here to Western scholars in the early 1890s, when Edison’s phonograph came to Korea. Its patrons included King Gojong, Horace Allen and William Noble, to name a few.
Yet Suk defines 1906 as pivotal. With the North American and European music industries expanding around the world, the London-based Gramophone and Typewriter (G&T) company began a “recording expedition” to Korea. “Intermediaries” who acted both as “talent scouts” and sales agents actively recruited for G&T. Their mission: record music and other types of performing arts for potential customers in the non-Western world. Their outcome: 101 sides of Korean recordings, eventually produced by U.S. affiliate Victor Talking Machine Co. and more widely consumed in the West.
This time when West meets East provides rich resources for studying the earliest attainable forms of Korean pre-modern music. Socioeconomic revelations of the era come out in these recordings, as well as depict the perception differences between the Western company and Korean public.