This research attempts to apply Hatten’s theory of musical gestures to analysing Korean contemporary music. Hatten introduces a semiotic theory musical gesture, understood as significant energetic shaping through time, in his book Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert(2004). In our gestural encounters with music, we, as a human being, can hardly force ourselves not to attent to significant energetic shaping as affective. An interpretation of musical gesture can help us to discover expressive motivations for the intricate structures and formal hierarchies in musical works. Depending on the theories of linguist D. Lidov and music practitioner A. Pierce, he created a new methodology for understanding the systematic nature of correlation between musical gesture and meaning. This paper focuses more on possibilities and limitations of this theory as an analysis tool for Korean contemporary music, than on the general explanation of this theory. The korean composer, Kang Joon-Il’s <A little piece for Clarinet>(1996) is selected for an appropriate sample to study. By analysing the work with gestural theory of Hatten, it is revealed that musical gestures with expressive properties can be considered as basic units of semiotic analysis for Korean contemporary music and a gestural perspective of Hatten offers insight into a composition’s integration of expression, subjectivity, musical discourse, and resulting expressive form as well. But Hatten’s theory is more appropriate to analyse the compositions with full of stylized topics which are intermingled with composer’s formal/expressive strategies of works, such as in the works of common practice period in Europe. From these interactions with style and strategies, the new meaning will emerge. Korean contemporary music, differently from western Classic and Romantic repertoires, has lack of musically stylized and so socially communicative gestural types. Futhermore, oppositionally marked affectiveness correlated with gestural types is neither one of principal characteristics of composition nor one of the ways of emerging meaning in Korean music. The process of emerging meaning in Korean musical work must be more investigated from the semiotic and cognitive scientific perspectives.