Shamanism is more than a Korean local religion. Implied by the Chinese character for music, in which a shaman holds handbells, it remains as a repository for musical traditions as well as inspirations. Despite this significance, however, female shamans called mudang have received relatively less attention due to the marginalization and the ill-balanced interests among contemporary composers. Against this backdrop, Korean woman composer Unsuk Chin and her composition Gougalon (2009/2012) offer a noticeable case study. Using three keywords such as dance, trance, and glance, I discuss how Gougalon, Movement III recreates mudang’s fortune-telling ritual for intercultural creativity.

Each keyword, in my discussion, is illustrated as the antitheses to three tendencies common in Korean new music: effacing, stylizing, and idealizing. Shown in Sukhi Kang’s Buru (1976) for instance, effacing replaces shaman’s unpredictable bodily actions (or what Rao 2023 would call shaman’s “materiality”) with organized performances and sounds. Countering this tendency, Gougalon III features what I call dancing melodies, in which regularity (e.g., consistency of pc-set <E,F#,Bb>) is countered by phenomenality (e.g., close mapping between unstable rhythmic displacements and particular pitches). Realizing the “intercultural synthesis” (Everett 2021) of classic coherence and idiosyncratic phenomenality, Chin’s dancing melodies reflect shaman’s unpredictable body in rituals—i.e., the corporeality that previously inspired American pianist David Burge. Meanwhile, stylizing and idealizing denote the tendency to contain shaman’s rituals in certain structures (e.g., ternary form) and ideals (e.g., nationalism). Against this, Gougalon III features textural expansions where the opening xylophone solo becomes a trance leader for other instruments while leaving no sense of direction. Indeed, the entire movement is structured more with ruptures and accelerations than logics, as if emulating mudang’s skillful glance at and manipulation of her audience.

My discussion of dance, trance, and glance in Gougalon III does more than illuminating Chin’s approach to Korean shamans. It also demonstrates that shamanism can inspire contemporary composers without being reduced to the passive object. With this and other case studies in the future, I hope that music theorists will be encouraged to explore local cultures, examine intercultural creativity, and diversify today’s music theory discipline.

This proposal examines the metrical contrasts in Wang Amao’s alto board-fiddle composition, One Person’s Stage (2021). Wang’s piece is characterized by its fluid meter shifts, creating a malleable melody. Upon analyzing the premier rendition by soloist Hu Yu, notable metrical patterns emerge that differ from the score, influenced by phenomenal accents (Lerdahl/Jackendoff 1983 and Sullivan 2023) like dynamics and articulation. Such patterns obscure the intended metric pulse, as they deviate from the printed time signatures.

Indeed, while such discrepancies between perception and notation are not uncommon in musics after 1900 (or even earlier), this study probes the relationship between metrical perception and voice-leading structure in the Introduction (mm. 1–29). To identify the metrical structure as I perceive it, this proposal employs Sullivan’s projection theory and his metrical categorizations (2023), and uses results to investigate how the rhythmic contexts shape my understating of the interconnectedness among the structural pitches defined by their metrical hierarchy. Though scoring for a solo instrument, my findings reveal an implicit contrapuntal texture woven by two distinct voices separated not just by different registers but also by diverse metrical frameworks.

This study also confronts two additional crucial aspects—the composer’s intensions behind her metrical notation and the performer’s metrical entrainment. I showed my analysis to the composer and the premier performer, receiving distinct feedback from each. The composer contests my analysis, emphasizing rhythmic dynamism based on her commitment to the notated time signatures. Conversely, the performer’s counting resonates closely with my analysis, highlighting how the motivic sequences and progressions are articulated by various phenomenal accents. The interplay of metrical contrasts in Wang’s piece provides deep insights into the complex relationships between intention and artistry in music, as interpreted by the listener-analyst, performer, and composer.

Within the growing field of electroacoustic music analysis, the predominant focus is on sound-based music in which sound, as opposed to pitch, represents the basic element of musical expression (Landy 2007). Consequently, the investigations of live electroacoustic music and some of the “traditional” analytical preoccupations that the pitch-based musical repertoire implies, have been largely overlooked (Emmerson and Landy 2016). This paper contributes to the analytical comprehension of that underrepresented repertoire. Building on two “note-views” in electroacoustic music—the one that ignores and the other that acknowledges spectral components of a pitch (Smalley 1997)—I propose hearing the pitch and noise in an interchangeable continuum. As a case study of my approach, I discuss select works by Jasna Veličković, a composer known for her distinctive way of integrating the sound of the electromagnetic field into the compositional process and performance.

Relating to the practice of the American experimentalists and a “do-it-yourself” (DIY) paradigm in electroacoustic music, Veličković precomposes the electromagnetic sound by reappropriating obsolete discarded objects—power adapters, plasma lamps, and remote controllers—which she recycles into musical instruments triggered by induction coils or interacting in a mutual dialogue. The performer is required to play both with and against the resulting interference and make compositional decisions in real time. Introducing traditional instruments in the described process brings an additional level of complexity, as I will illustrate in my analysis of Veličković's two recent compositions—Underneath (2020) and Adapting (2021).

The two works are conceived as a perceptually provoking interplay between the composed possibilities for electromagnetic sound and the sound composed in the traditional sense. However, the sound result of the performers’ gestures only partly and in varying degrees fulfills the listener’s expectations––familiar pitches may emerge from the unfamiliar performer’s gestures, just as unfamiliar noise may arise from the familiar ones. Expanding on the model of the behavioral relationships between the gesture-bearing performer and the surrounding acousmatic context (Smalley 1997), I will show how in Underneath the mutual approximation and distancing of noise and pitch develop into a dramatic sound self-reflection, while in Adapting, the result is a delicate harmony of oppositions.