Artistic Habitus in an Intercultural World: A Tale of Two Artists

The construct of interculturality has influenced significantly the positioning of the works of non-European, non-American composers in the realm of international composition. The common paradigm of early-twentieth-century and post-war compositions embraced a centeredness of the European classical art tradition around which the "rest" circulated and/or served as resources for creativity. Mid-twentieth-century Korean composers such as Sukhi Kang and Isang Yun adapted to such paradigms as they incorporated their individual stamp on the foundational power structures of post-modern composition. As time passed, and more artists from Korea were developing their own paradigms of "contemporary composition" and artists outside of Korea became increasingly sensitive to pitfalls of Orientalism and appropriation, a dialogue began to form. This paper takes as its heart both the allegorical and concrete dialogues inherent to contemporary composition engaging with the instruments, aesthetics and ideas of Korean music traditions together with those of other musical traditions. To avoid unintentionally reinserting an East/West binary in analysis, I examine representative work of two artists from two very different cultural and performance contexts as well as different but overlapping time spaces: composer Tai-Bong Chun and performing artist, jazz vocalist and composer Jen Shyu. In examining the creative philosophies and creations of these artists, I focus on the authorial agency (Everett 2004:4) of the individual artist as a guide for interpretation of their work, and I emphasize the need for a shift in the assumptions underscoring the meaning of "intercultural composition." By focusing on the personal experience of composition which draws on disparate cultural roots, the aim of this paper is to argue for the importance of artistic habitus the space of possibilities wherein which creative choice materializes in considerations of intercultural composition.