Born in the year of the liberation Korea from Japanese colonisation, Younghi Pagh-Paan (*1945) grew up during the Korean war and the subsequent division of her homeland. Although she trained in Seoul, her career as a composer properly started with her move to Freiburg in Germany in 1974. The result was a culture shock, and, throughout much of her career, Pagh-Paan struggled with her displacement and endeavoured to reconcile her gender and cultural identity as an Asian woman with Western modernism; vowing, in her own words, ‘[n]ot [to] write music that distances me from what […] I perceive inside me as the root of our culture’. This chapter discusses Pagh-Paan’s career and her aesthetic beliefs, such as her commitment to the student movement and democratic opposition in her country and her syncretistic religiosity that embraces the different spiritual traditions of her country, such as Shamanism and Taoism, as well as her fervent Catholicism. Analysing the reflection of these ideas in her music I conclude that, transcending notions of cultural contrast or ‘East-meets-West fusion’, Pagh-Paan’s work is a response to more than a century of intimate entanglements between Western and Korean culture.

South Korea’s past offers an example of an authoritarian context in which police roles proliferated. Besides maintaining order, police officers in Seoul were deployed for all sorts of purposes. Police were positioned as representatives of a state that had, in the 1960s and 1970s, ambitious plans for remaking society. Seoul’s large underclass posed, in the visions of City Hall and the central government, challenges to those plans. The policing of vagrancy in this period serves as a window onto the interface between state and society. Despite impressive coercive resources, police struggled to impose the state’s demands in managing the streets of Seoul. Instead, they made compromises. In order to attend to their many tasks, police relied on delegates with no formal authority and on irregular procedures. These observations point to a situation of unrestrained power that was also, effectively, limited.

East Asia had incorporated Western music well before dodecaphony was introduced. Its foray into atonality and dodecaphony is unsurprising. Japan, as the first country to fully embrace Westernisation, played a major role. Developments of dodecaphony in China and Korea were connected to Japan through an active network of ideas, print media, and movement of people in the region. Despite their shared resources, however, wars and politics determined whether or not (and when) composers in different East Asian countries had the liberty to explore dodecaphony. China was close to developing dodecaphonic compositions before being stopped after the founding of Communist China in 1949. The post-Mao introduction of dodecaphony, led by Luo Zhongrong, was a late ‘arrival’. Japanese composers’ initial enthusiasm for dodecaphony did not gain in significance. Yoritsune Matsudaira and Joji Yuasa were representative. In Korea, led by Isang Yun and Sukhi Kang, serialism was employed thoughtfully by several generations of composers throughout their creative output.

This chapter defines serialism in terms of dodecaphonic technique, beginning with a discussion of the role of analysis in relationship to performance. Whilst Webern’s Variations op. 27 have been the subject of exhaustive analysis by other commentators, the present discussion takes a somewhat different approach, considering the interpretive insights gained by a study of sketch material. The composer’s drafts are examined in relation to the published score for their potential to enrich the performer’s perceptions. The second part of the chapter traces the movement to integral serialism in the post-war period, and the challenges of ‘pointillist’ scores with their profusion of agogic and dynamic marks, which leave seemingly little scope for interpretation in the traditional sense. The contributions of Boulez and Stockhausen to the piano repertoire are considered, and a discussion of the role of the interpreter in indeterminate scores of the period occupies the final section of the chapter.

In Chapter 6, the analysis of mobilization moves to examine the complex role of legacy in squats. It starts with a case in which prior protest experience was counterproductive (illustrated with Seoul’s Yongsan) and continues with a comparison of three squats with enduring anarchist legacies (Hamburg’s Gängeviertel and its antecedent protests of Park Fiction and Skam, as well as Toronto’s Pope Squat, and Madrid’s Tabacalera). In these latter three cases, experiential tools and cultural producers were critical to the outcomes. The analysis also illustrates that prior protest is helpful in gaining the squat but an enduring outcome depends heavily on organizational features and varieties of capitalism.