The Tradition/Innovation Conundrum: Further Reflections on the UNESCO 2nd World Conference on Arts Education

In our last post we suggested that the dichotomies commonly drawn between tradition and innovation, between the preservation of national arts and the assimilation of global technologies, suggest a false divide in human culture. The conundrum is how do we close the gap with justice to both sides?

Korean-American composer Hi Kyung Kim addressed this issue directly in her keynote talk on cultural dialogue in music. Her own attempts "to forge an artistic voice out of the combination of cultures" in her own background sensitized her to tensions between traditional and contemporary practices in music. As founder and director of the Pacific Rim Music Festival at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Kim has contributed to the recent revival of interest in traditional music - and to discussion about how that music should be treated and preserved. Composers who draw on their cultural heritage(s), she has found, face three options.

The first is to treat that heritage as something that must be preserved untouched. If one is to reproduce some aspect of such a traditional art, it must be completely within the context and using the methods and aesthetics of the tradition. The problem with this approach for the creative composer is that it does not allow the tradition to grow, and if the tradition does not grow along with modern culture itself, then it may become irrelevant or even lost.

Korean gayageum (zither) and jang-go (drum).

So many composers choose the second option, which is to modify traditional art forms, using modern instruments, staging performances in modern settings, or adapting traditional themes to contemporary expressions. While such modifications alter the content and sometimes even the intent of the traditional form, they can permit the tradition to evolve and stay relevant.

Finally, Hi Kyung Kim suggested that a third option is cultural synthesis: to meld selected aspects of the traditional form with selected aspects of contemporary art to create something novel. Such syntheses are like hybrid plants, often more vigorous and adaptive than the individual elements from which they are created. That is certainly our impression of Kim's own compositions, evocative cross-cultural fusions of diverse instruments, techniques and musical sensibilities. Her work in music serves as an excellent model for the reconciling of tradition and innovation in and across every discipline.

Another example of the tradition/innovation synthesis we met up with in Seoul was the 4D "digilog" art performance that opened the UNESCO conference. Seoul Rainbow was written and directed by O-Young Lee, literary critic, writer, and Korea's first Minister of Culture (1990-1991). Lee is no stranger to spectacle, having staged the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics held in Korea in 1988. At the UNESCO conference, he introduced his latest collaborative innovation combining live analog performance with state-of-the art hologram. Everything happens simultaneously in the three dimensions of space and the fourth dimension of time. More to the point, it happens synergistically, as real-time interaction technology coordinates the digital imaging with the music and movements of real performers. A new art form, this fusion of real and virtual spectacle goes by the name of digilog samulnori (hyper stage).

Traditional drumming on a hyper stage.

Significantly enough, Lee's mind-opening production also melded the highest levels of preserved Korean arts -- including traditional drumming, singing, and dancing -- with the most advanced Korean IT technologies. The result both honored Korean culture and placed it at the cutting edge of the electronic arts curve. This is the sort of innovation that can only be made by combining past and present to create a new future.

O-Young Lee's work presupposes the collapsing of yet another cultural divide, which in Western nations goes by the name of "The Two Cultures," after the famous C. P. Snow essay of that name. Midway through the 20th century Snow, himself a physicist, novelist, and politician, argued that the arts and the sciences represent two, non-communicating cultures. Despite growing recognition since Snow's time that these two modes of exploring reality share much common ground, many people today persist in this two-culture belief. Many people perceive art and science as antithetical to one another.

This is too bad. If we are to preserve multiple cultures and simultaneously use them as catalysts to spur creativity and innovation, we must understand that science and technology will inevitably be part of the new mix, whether the science and technology are used to preserve traditional arts, or to enfold them into something as modern and inspiring as digilog performances. Indeed, it would be a terrible shame if in sustaining traditional cultures, we set them up as contrary and even contradictory to innovation and progress. As composer Kim has argued, there are three valid options before us, and the third is synthesis.

We'll perform our concluding synthesis of the UNESCO Conference in Seoul in our next post and toast the future as well.

© 2010 Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein

Link to Seoul Rainbow @ http://global.dstrict.com/projects/4dart.php

Link to more about the 4 d digilog samulnori (hyper stage) @ http://global.dstrict.com/projects/digilog_samulnori.php