Madlen Poguntke: Reframing Artsong: Transcultural Perspectives from Korean Gisaeng to European Salon Culture

“The state of female artists is very good. But the very definition of art has been biased in that ‘art’ was what men did in a European tradition and ‘crafts’ were what women and natives did. But it’s actually all the same.” – Gloria Steinem. Taking Steinem’s remark as reference, this paper disputes the limited, Eurocentric portrayal of artsong and redefines it from a transnational and transcultural angle. This study is a part of my Ph.D. research on female composers in Germany and South Korea, which deals with the question of how gendered authorship in song traditions has been the subject of definition, valuation, and transmission across diverse cultural settings.

The term artsong in the history of European music is generally linked to the 19th-century Kunstlied, which is deeply rooted in the male-dominated concert tradition and is maintained by a large number of notated works. Nevertheless, in Korea, gisaeng, i.e., highly educated female artists, were creating and performing poetic songs a few hundred years prior with several 16th-century-documented examples and historical evidence signifying that the origin was much earlier. Although these works were of the same quality in the combination of text and music, they have seldom been purposed in the same conceptual frame, partly due to them being in oral and performance-based traditions and not in written score.

The paper reveals the ways in which different methods of preservation, performance, and cultural validation have shaped our understanding of what counts as “artsong,” by contrasting the formalized European Kunstlied tradition with the Korean gisaeng practice. It does so through historical research, cultural comparison, and feminist musicology which altogether expand the genre definition beyond one that acknowledges the artistry of women’s song traditions universally and the historical oppressions of non-Western and orally transmitted repertoires. By this reframing, one can see the connections between different and even opposite music histories, but also the common ways wherby women haved used lyric song to be able to express their personal lives, make cultural commentary and to resist in a subtle way against limitations of their social worlds, no matter what time or place.

Madlen Poguntke is a flutist and musicologist whose work bridges artistic practice and academic research. She holds two Bachelor of Music degrees and the Staatsexamen in secondary school music education from the University of Regensburg. She earned two Master of Music degrees in flute and traverso at the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich and a Master of Arts in musicology at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Her research focuses on historical performance practice, socio-historical aspects of music, and the impact of AI on music. She is currently pursuing a PhD in music education in Munich and a PhD in musicology at Seoul National University. She has received multiple awards and scholarships and was honored for her artistic achievement as a cultural representative of her hometown. In addition to her artistic work, she contributes reviews and essays to leading music journals, engaging in scholarly discourse on music.

Madlen Poguntke: Reframing Artsong: Transcultural Perspectives from Korean Gisaeng to European Salon Culture

Other events