Pages 51-61 – Keith Pratt – On First Hearing the Court Nightingale (Reflections on a Personal View of Korean Music in the 1970s)’

The 1970s would prove to be a fateful decade for gugak, traditional Korean music. Its greatest modern historian, Professor Lee Hye-ku, was at the height of his analytical powers; after decades of neglect through the colonial and post-war eras, its popularity was growing among South Korean music students and beginning to experience a long overdue revival in popular awareness; even in the Western wo...