This study set out to analyze the implementation processes and current propulsion states of projects to support musical creation currently being pushed ahead, identify problems with them, and propose improvement measures for them. The musical market has made rapid growth, entering the industrialization stage in full scale
since the 2000s. Of various cultural content domains to produce high value added, musicals have attracted attention as the “core content” at the national level for their high growth rate and audience demand.
Despite the quantitative growth of musical industry, however, the production environment of musical content has not changed much from the past. In that environment, projects to support musical creation, which have been carried out by various subjects, continue to discover a variety of musicals with their unique identities year after year. Many of those projects, however, concentrate their supports on the stage of finding new actors and works heavily, providing few supports for the “cultivation” stage to ensure that musicals will be put on the stage formally. The situation can be improved by diversifying the content of supports by the stages of supports for musical creation and putting production professionals in projects to support musical creation.
Chapter 2 examined the current state of musical industry in the nation and proposed a need to support musical creation. Entering the stage of industrialization, the musical market of South Korea has rapidly expanded in its scale. As the musical market has been formed around large licensed musicals, a majority of creative musicals are still in an environment of difficult conditions to develop new works regardless of the market growth. The present study thus analyzed the current state of projects to support musical creation as a way to resolve the imbalance in the musical industry. It has not been long since supports started to be provided for creative efforts in the field of musicals, but there are various projects to support such creative efforts. Of them, the study focused on “Project to Support the Cultivation of Creative Musicals,” which has a relatively long history and has established its own support process, the Creation Support Project of Daegu international Musical Festival, and “Creative Minds” by CJ to analyze the characteristics and supportive processes of each project.
Supports at the level of policy to cultivate the musical genre began with the “Creative Factory” in 2010, when they provided stepwise supports to plays and musicals in their production processes. The project title was changed to “Project to Support the Cultivation of Creative Musicals” after the separation of musical genre from the play genre, which reinforced the continuity of stepwise supports provided by the project.
Daegu International Musical Festival has been held since 2007 to “expand the base of creative musicals in South Korea.” The organization committee holds a competition for musical scripts and music and offers financial supports for the premiere of winners during the festival every year, trying to raise the quality level of musical industry. Given its characteristics as a “festival,” it has an advantage of attracting various groups of audience and promotes the
developmental possibilities of works by inviting the winning musicals next year.
CJ Culture Foundation has developed and put on the stage musical content by running a program to support musical creation called “CJ Creative Minds.” The program is significant in that a private organization focuses on the genre of “musicals” and supports the creative activities of creators. It solidifies its identity as a project to provide supports in various forms according to the eye level of creators.
In addition, there are more diverse support projects at the incubation stage to discover new musical content and expand the base of musical industry in the nation including “Yegreen Encore” of Seoul Musical Festival and “Studio Shiya” of Wooran Foundation.
Those new support projects have worked to broaden the scope of opportunities for new creators to make a debut and identify various pieces of musical content.
Chapter 3 examined the common characteristics of those projects to support creative musicals, discussed their limitations, and proposed improvement measures for them. The major projects to support musical creation have been in coexistence for the last several years, supporting each development stage of creative musical content and carrying out a joint incubation job. With the rising number of projects to discover new creators and support their creative works in recent years, the old support projects for creative musicals have reinforced their academic aspect to educate creators. There were, however, problems, as well: such support projects were heavily concentrated in the area of discovering new faces, thus making the competition among new faces even fiercer and restricting the opportunities for the old ones to grow and develop. There were not enough supports for the “cultivation” stage, which is critical for a musical to become a regular show, which points to the limitation that musicals developed with a lot of costs and efforts have a difficult time settling down as part of competitive repertoire. The study thus proposed an alternative to distribute supports for creative musicals, which had been heavily concentrated in the discovery of new faces, through the diversification of stepwise supports along the process of developing a musical. The study also raised a need to design a practical and systematic support system to recruit professional musical producers for projects to support creative musicals and link creative musicals to formal musical production.