When Songs Don't Work: Western Tonalities and Korean Breath in Children's Songs of the Colonial Period

Abstract:In the 1920s, colonial Korean children had different opportunities and materials to sing. Newly established missionary schools adapted hymns for children, and the colonial schools run by the Japanese regime considered song time to be essential to children's emotional and intellectual development. It is from this diverse ecology of musical offerings that original Korean sung poems, or tongyo, emerged. Tongyo were short poems written by often prominent writers that were then set to music by Korean composers, many of whom studied Western music in Japan. Tongyo composers wrote works that, unlike Christian hymns (ch'ansongga) and Japanese school songs (changga), were written in the Korean language and were intended for Korean voices but were structured by what was then novel Western musical conventions. Through an analysis of tongyo by two seminal figures, Yun Kŭgyŏng and Chŏng Sunch'ŏl, this paper illuminates the musical grammar by which Yun and Chŏng re-oriented the sensibilities of their young singers. This comparison reveals the challenges of fitting western tonalities to the Korean language, thereby questioning the prevalent assumption that tongyo were national forms whose value hinges on their effortless communication of authentic Korea emotions.