Dynamic Korea and Rhythmic Form

Abstract

Most of the current discussions on globalization of music have focused on cultural imperialism, neoliberal markets, and media technologies; intersections between commercial cultures and resistance movements; and the creation of new publics. Through these inquiries, many define music to be a mere mediating apparatus of ideas, power, currency, and/or politics. Katherine In-Young Lee’s Dynamic Korea and Rhythmic Form begins its journey with a critique of how only a few scholars delve into the “musical reasons as to why certain musical practices move with apparent ease” (3). Her question is closely linked with the raison d’être of the field of ethnomusicology today—what distinctive aspects does music have when it departs from its cultural roots, transcends political and physical boundaries, transforms its meanings and forms during this journey, and becomes a social process that produces a new set of content, politics, and identities? Borrowing Martin Stokes’s words, Lee asks why and how “particular musical forms, styles, processes, sounds, rhythms, and metrical practices traverse national cultural boundaries.”1 Her music-centered analysis of samul nori, a globally popular South Korean percussion genre, provides rich accounts of how the dynamic rhythmic form becomes a critical site for musical encounters that emerge in a variety of cross-cultural contexts.Lee’s emphasis on form does not imply that she dismisses the sociopolitical context of the globalization of music. Rather, Dynamic Korea and Rhythmic Form deploys a multifaceted approach to samul nori by exploring the genre through the diverse lenses of history, government policies, ethnographic accounts of individuals, and formal analyses. Lee provides an in-depth narrative that includes the oral and written history of samul nori through musical analyses and ethnographic research that she conducted as the overseas coordinator and tour manager of SamulNori Hanullim and as a translator and coordinator of various samul nori-related public events. Her account is especially valuable, as it draws from her firsthand experience as an ethnographer who has witnessed the most recent change of the samul nori scene for more than a decade. Lee argues that the flexibility and dynamism of samul nori’s rhythmic form produce meaningful cross-cultural encounters that enable active reinterpretation and re-creation of musical tradition and a new creation of local identity and culture. By presenting the dynamic circulation of samul nori’s rhythmic form, Lee beautifully articulates that music, even in its standardized form as a “composition,” is not a final outcome that merely remains as a discrete object that is independent from social activities but serves as a nexus of human interactions across boundaries.Chapter 1 begins with the disbandment of the first samul nori quartet, SamulNori, to underscore the outlived popularity and reception of samul nori as a global music genre. Because of SamulNori’s fluid membership, Lee suggests viewing the quartet “less as a fixed entity and more as a collaborative project” that involves dynamic changes with a diverse group of agents (13). In this chapter, she introduces the SamulNori project led by the Seoul-based Konggan Sarang Theater and the affiliated cultural activists. Chapter 2 presents one of the most popular samul nori repertories that is learned by amateur enthusiasts around the world. By analyzing the musical properties of “Yŏngnam nongak,” Lee discusses how the piece features a majority of formal structures and rhythmic progressions that are common to other samul nori repertoires. Here, the term dynamic becomes a useful analytic as Lee demonstrates how the rhythmic form of samul nori features the dramatic yet balancing forces that draw samul nori fans and amateur performers all over the world.The third chapter articulates the South Korean government’s support of SamulNori (and later SamulNori Hanullim) to endorse samul nori as a sonic symbol of South Korea. South Korea’s first nation-branding agenda with the slogan of “Dynamic Korea” was the government’s attempt to construct a new national identity by displaying both traditional heritage and modern economic/technological development of South Korea on an international level. Under this agenda, samul nori aptly served as a sonic representation that would replace the previous monikers of South Korea, “Land of the Morning Calm” and the “Hermit Kingdom,” which were conjured by Westerners under the “same logic and rationale that Japan used for its imperialist conquests at the turn of the twentieth century” (65). The use of Korean percussion sounds in the FIFA game chants during the 2002 World Cup and the distribution of an instructional video for “Samul nori chants” in collaboration with the Red Devils reveal how certain musical sounds can contribute to the image curation of a nation.The last two chapters call attention to the cross-cultural encounters and interactions between nonprofessional performers and samul nori in transnational contexts. Based on Lee’s ethnographic interviews with the samul nori enthusiasts who have participated in this global culture over the past two decades, chapter 4 presents stories of Suzanna Samstag (an American samul nori fan who became the first agent and managing director of the SamulNori quartet), Shinparam (a traditional drumming group of the Korean American community in Minnesota, the United States), Swissamul (an all-female group of Swiss nationals based in Basel, Switzerland), Canto del Cielo (now known as Samulnori Mexico, the first all-Mexican female samul nori group), and Shinawi (a college circle at Waseda University based on the Korean percussion genre). The stories describe the life-changing experiences of individuals who reside outside South Korea performing samul nori and being part of international samul nori groups. While this chapter consists of personal anecdotes of amateur performers, it is worth noting that it serves as a nexus of the rest of the chapters that discuss samul nori’s dynamism from different angles. The collection of personal narratives in this chapter animates the previous discussions on the recreation of samul nori dynamism “not as part of monolithic processes of globalization” but as idiosyncratic encounters at an international level (107).Careful not to paint too rosy a picture, Lee addresses the limits of the globalization of samul nori in the last chapter. While the rhythm-based arrangements, such as “Yŏngnam nongak” and “Samdo nongak karak,” were well received and popularized by the amateur performers overseas, some arrangements, such as the text-based narrative prayer pinari, never became globalized in the same way. The 2008 World SamulNori festival demonstrates how this self-celebratory festival strategically highlighted both local heritage and international popularity of Korean culture through its deployment of a vernacular, text-based form (pinari) and a rhythm-based form (samul nori) in the opening ceremony.Lee concludes the book with an emphasis on samul nori’s rhythmic form as a major force behind its global journey. She argues that through the organic process of “musical trial and error, adaptation, and revision,” regional p’ungmul rhythms have transformed into condensed, standardized forms of “compositions” that contain elasticity, or “a flexibility to figuratively breathe in performance” (134). Lee refers to Ewe drumming, Japanese taiko, Brazilian samba, Caribbean zouk, and hip-hop as rhythm-based genres and contends that such “rhythmic forms can be easier to grasp than other types of musical forms coming from the same culture,” such as text-based or modal-based forms (136). And thus, she concludes that the effectively designed rhythmic form of Korean percussion music would be one of SamulNori’s greatest achievements.Lee’s ethnographic journey on the “form” of samul nori allows us to extend our understanding of music and its cultural and political transformations. And one of my suggestions for an avenue for further investigation would be the sociopolitical milieu (e.g., the imperial power of Japan and the West) of the Korean traditional music circle that had led or even forced the musicians to perceive their music as an identifiable art object rather than a social activity of music-making.2 Objectification of samul nori as a portable medium would have facilitated its global distribution and popularity, although such change would have also brought about schizophonic mimesis, or “a broad spectrum of interactive and extractive practices,” which entails renegotiations of identity and, in the worst case, cultural appropriation by outsiders of the culture.3 In her articulation of international fans’ diverse encounters with samul nori outside South Korea, Lee addresses the descriptors and phrases that were used by these fans to describe their first encounters with samul nori. Lee points out that some of the descriptions entail a fascination with the exoticized Other (106), and the discussion would benefit from addressing how mediated experiences function through a fascination with the Other, detachment of cultural origin, recirculation of the object, and eventually, recreation of the samul nori identity. Such discussion would also decentralize the story of the government-sponsored World SamulNori Festival, which focused on the hierarchical relationship between the international amateur learners and the Korean professional performers, and further provide a more complex web of the globally intertwined social relations that center on the Korean percussion music.Lee’s thorough discussion of the government sponsorship begs further discussion of samul nori as a commodity within global capitalism. Relying heavily on government support does not mean that these South Korean musicians make a living outside of the capitalist system. However, the literature on kugak (South Korean national/traditional music) often portrays traditional art forms as noncommercial objects that are solely supported by the government, as though they are “untainted” by capitalist forces. However, as a number of scholars in cultural globalization studies have argued, the nation-state is transforming itself to readjust to global capitalist flows. Considering that the Red Devils received financial sponsorship from chaebol conglomerates and that conglomerates often invite samul nori teams to their company events, it might be fruitful to discuss samul nori’s nationalist proclamation and global popularity in the context of capitalism.As one of the pivotal works on the musical globalization of samul nori, Dynamic Korea and Rhythmic Form serves as a crucial addition to diverse fields, including ethnomusicology and cultural globalization studies. While the scarce English literature on samul nori—namely Nathan Hesselink’s SamulNori: Contemporary Korean Drumming and the Rebirth of Itinerant Performance Culture (2012) and Keith Howard’s Creating Korean Music: Tradition, Innovation, and the Discourse of Identity (2006) and SamulNori: Korean Percussion for a Contemporary World (2015)—has dealt with the historical background of the creation of the genre, canonic considerations, and meanings of tradition and heritage in the modern global society, Lee contributes to the literature through her marvelous multi-sited ethnography, which explores the global portability and dynamism of samul nori’s rhythmic forms.4Dynamic Korea and Rhythmic Form will also serve as an excellent textbook for students who study Hallyu, traditional performing arts, South Korea’s national branding agenda, and the globalization of music.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.