'K-ourante' by Jinwook Jung, performed by HIIIT

Описание: Recorded live on 8 September 2024 at TivoliVredenburg during Gaudeamus Festival 2024, which took place from 4 to 8 September at various locations in Utrecht, The Netherlands.

K-ourante explores the intersection between French Baroque and Korean K-pop through music, gesture, and coded theatricality. As a composer who grew up and studied in both South Korea and France, Jinwook Jung is interested in the frictions, dissonances, and resonances between these two cultures, particularly on aesthetic and identity levels.

Just as the nobles of Versailles in the eighteenth century wore wigs, lace, and makeup as signs of noble masculinity, today’s K-pop idols embody a form of stylised, sophisticated, emotional, and visually refined masculinity. These figures subvert binary representations of gender by adopting markers that, in some Western contexts, might be perceived as “effeminate” or “queer.” Yet, although these visual codes may appear similar, the cultural interpretations of them differ profoundly between East and West.

It is precisely this unstable zone between surface and identity, between costume and essence, that this work seeks to translate musically. The interplay between authenticity and artifice, between ornament and meaning, becomes a site of sonic and corporeal friction. The musicians transform into a kind of Baroque boyband, performing and distorting gestures from the French courante within a theatrical space where history and pop contaminate one another.

This is neither parody nor homage: it is a sincere attempt to listen across centuries, cultures, and bodies. Who decides what is “masculine,” what is “queer,” what is “performance”? And how can music open up a space to question, unsettle, and liberate these representations?