My study is a critical examination of the historiography of Korean musical scholarship and a more comprehensive view of Korean music and history. The main goal of this study is to elaborate a new form of rhetoric and strategy for both historical and ethnographic studies of Korean music. By exploring the various attempts of earlier scholars to establish indigenous musical scholarship, my study details how musical scholarship can symbolically represent the core of historical tension and amnesia which has resulted in conflict between indigenous vs. foreign, tradition vs. modernity, and past vs. present in modern Korean society. Following the spirit of Michel Foucault’s dialogics and micropolitics, my study explores the following theme: why and how academic discourses have played an ambiguous role in encouraging, and at the same time discouraging monolithic and canonized language use and scholarly convention. Furthermore, my observation on discourse reveals the interaction produced between power and resistance in the larger process of institutionalization and the concomitant processes of de-institutionalization.