Professor Hilary Finchum-Sung
Professor Hilary V. Finchum-Sung joined SNU as the first non-Korean faculty member of the SNU Department of Korean Music in 2009. She encountered Korean traditional music seventeen years ago through sinawi, a form of Korean shamanic music, and received her doctorate degree in ethnomusicology at Indiana University. She learned to play the haegeum (a traditional Korean instrument on the picture) to better understand Korean music and performs at Namsan Hanok Village and Deoksugung regularly. Her undergraduate course World Music has drawn much attention as the class explores Asian, African and Latin American music from an ethnomusicological perspective. She teaches a popular Introduction to Korean Music class for undergraduates, as well.The fact that many Koreans are uninterested in their own traditional music means, she says, that we need full-time traditional Korean music teachers in elementary, middle and high school classrooms to allow our children to be better acquainted with it.
- Professor Finchum-Sung's SNU-ON open class: http://snuon.snu.ac.kr/_HTML/course_view.php?id=90
- SNU Department of Korean Music: http://music.snu.ac.kr/eng/academics/korean/
Summary of Seoul Shinmun's interview article published on Sept. 18, 2014
Summary by LEE Hee Un, SNU English Editor, gurume0221@snu.ac.kr