This paper is part autobiographical and part observational. It opens with a reflection on my first encounters with gugak musicians and scholars at the Durham Oriental Music Festival in 1979 and during my first visit to Korea in 1981 (when I met gugak scholars preparing for the conference of what was then the International Folk Music Council). I discuss my attempts to tune my ears to Korean soundworlds, learning to perform janggu drum, haegeum fiddle and gayageum zither, and through ethnomusicological fieldwork. However, I recognize the impossibility of escaping my “out-inside-ness” (to use Bakhtin’s term). Next, I explore how the territory of gugak has expanded over time, although the Korean methodology for its study, gugakhak, has remained largely constant. I ask why some of its expert researchers suggest gugakhak is distinct from ethnomusicology, and from the accounts of Korean music by ethnomusicologists. Stasis is not a term that encapsulates how Euro-American musicology (and ethnomusicology) has developed, evolved and fragmented since the 1980s, hence I contrast gugakhak scholarship with how the focus of foreign scholars researching Korean music has changed, much in keeping with musicology and ethnomusicology more globally, shifting from historical studies to studies of contemporary practice, and from court and folk traditions to fusions and pop. To illustrate my observations, I note that the accounts of Korean music in MGG (1996, 2015), New Grove (1993, 2001) and the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (2001), noting how these have been criticized in Korea but also showing how today they appear, in many ways, anachronistic. I argue that the broadening of gugak over time, and the shifts in what is studied, challenge perceptions of what Korean music is, hence in my final section, I question whether the study of gugak should remain distinct from the study of Western-originating musical forms (eumak, seoyang eumak, yangak) in Korea. I take my cue from the “Third Generation” of Korean composers and critics—that all music performed by Koreans in Korea is Korean music—and ask whether a unified Korean musicology could emerge and, if so, how this might be constituted to enable, during the current “Asian Century,” Korean scholars to challenge Western hegemonies of knowledge.