Hearts of Pine

Details: Category: Book Café

In the wake of the Asia-Pacific War, Korean survivors of the "comfort women" system—those bound into sexual slavery for the Japanese military—lived under great pressure not to speak about what had happened to them. Joshua Pilzer’s Hearts of Pine provides a window into the lives of three such survivors: Pak Duri, Mun Pilgi, and Bae Chunhui. Over the course of ten years, the author worked with these elderly women: smoking with them, eating with them, singing and playing with them, and trying to understand and document their worlds of song.

During four decades of secrecy and the subsequent decades of the "comfort women" protest movement, music helped these women cope with and express their experiences, forge and sustain identities and social relationships, and record and convey their struggles and philosophies of life. Through these intimate portraits, Hearts of Pine illustrates the personal and social power of music, and presents heretofore unrecorded histories of the "comfort women" system and postwar South Korean public culture as written in women's song. In this presentation, the author introduces his ten-year project of fieldwork. He discusses recording and collecting songs, attempts to understand the many gulfs of culture and experience that separated him from the survivors, and the idea of Korean music as an alternative Korean history.

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Thursday, May 3, 2012

Hearts of Pine

with

Dr. Joshua D. Pilzer
Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology, University of Toronto

About the Speaker

Joshua D. Pilzer (PhD, University of Chicago, 2006) is an assistant professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto, specializing in Korean and Japanese music and modernity. His current research concerns the place of music in the texture of post-colonial Korean life, music’s social utility and social poetics, and music as alternative history. He is interested in particular in the relationships between music, survival, traumatic experience, marginalization, socialization, public culture, and identity. In addition to Hearts of Pine (Oxford University Press, 2012), Pilzer has published articles in Ethnomusicology, Dongyang Umak Yeonggu, and The Courtesan's Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), and has forthcoming articles in The Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology and Music and War. He is currently conducting fieldwork for his next book project, an ethnography of music and song among Korean victims of the atomic bombing of Japan and their children in Hapcheon, “Korea’s Hiroshima.”