Searching for home – music-cultural practices in East Asia
Why are specific musical practices, at specific moments of time in the history of China and Japan, linked to specific ideas, ideals and ideologies of home and belonging? This is the question that subproject B01 intends to explore.
project description
How do implicit concepts of home (one's old village, the land of one's ancestors, the family home) figure in this context? Subproject B01 examines four instruments, each one of them designated a ‘national instrument’ at the beginning of the 20th century: the lutes pipa and biwa, and the zithers zheng and koto.
While in both countries, lutes arrived from afar, coming ‘home' through various processes of integration, zithers, on the other hand, can be traced back to some of the earliest documents and archaeological finds: they appear to be firmly rooted in both countries. In the project, we consider processes of ‘modelling a sense of home’ or plain ‘homing’: on the one hand, the instruments themselves, as artefacts, become symbols of home, On the other hand, this act of ‘modelling' is also realised in word and sound — specific literary lores and musical repertoires begin to be associated with these instruments, making them stand for ‘home’ and ‘belonging'. The aim of the project is to reveal the specific conditions and the dynamics involved in these homing processes which will be theorised from a transcultural perspective.
Team
visiting scholars 2025/26
Jieun Kim studied musicology and church music in Seoul (Korea) and recieved a doctorate in musicology from Universität Heidelberg. After multiple stays in Berlin and Seoul she is dedicated to her research project Home(s) in movement: Musical practices of Korean musicians in Germany. Her central question is, how Korean music students, professional musicians and composers redefine their notions of home(s) in the context of musical practice, institutions and transnational networks.
