Dynamic Korea and Rhythmic Form. Katherine In-Young Lee

       INTRODUCTION

      Hip-hop. Gamelan. Taiko. Samul nori. These are just a handful of musical genres that have become truly global in the past century. Not only are these musics enjoyed by diverse audiences; they are regularly performed in locales that may have little or no connection to the genre’s country of origin. While cross-cultural musical interaction is neither novel nor surprising, the widespread transmission of these genres to musical communities around the world beginning in the late twentieth century is nonetheless remarkable. This phenomenon has often been explained by some of globalization’s grandest narratives—Westernization, neoliberalism, and the widespread diffusion of media technologies.

      But what makes one form of music go global and another one stay relatively put? And what compels people with limited musical training to actually learn how to perform music that may be culturally distant from them? Lastly, what are some of the mechanisms that facilitate the pedagogical transmission of a musical practice, across cultural and national boundaries? Dynamic Korea explores these questions through the lens of a South Korean percussion genre called samul nori. First created in Seoul in 1978, samul nori (which translates simply into “four things play”) is a neo-traditional musical repertory that features the use of four different percussion instruments. Since the 1980s, the drum-and-gong-based genre has been performed on many international stages by professional ensembles. It also holds the distinction of having been transmitted to amateur musical communities around the world. Samul nori is performed by musical groups in Korean diasporic communities and also in places where a connection to Korea is limited or unexpected, such as Mexico City and Basel, Switzerland. Like other expressive forms that have “gone global,” samul nori has been uneven in its charted movement, with certain pathways tread more frequently than others because of proximity (Seoul to Osaka, Japan), ethnic ties (Los Angeles and Berlin), or idiosyncratic reasons (Paris). But even despite this asymmetry, samul nori is undeniably a genre that has traveled far and wide. It is actively practiced outside the country of its origin.

      With its transmission abroad and regular appearances on international stages, samul nori is regarded as an important sonic and cultural symbol of South Korea. The prolific scholar of Korean music Keith Howard proclaimed that by 1994 samul nori “was firmly established as an icon of Korean identity and was arguably the most popular genre of traditional music both at home and abroad” (2006, 2). Samul nori, in fact, precedes the trendier “K-pop” genre as one of South Korea’s successful musical exports. One could argue that it was the first ripple in what would later become known as the Korean Wave.¹ And although it is rooted in much older musical traditions that date back to a unified Korean peninsula, samul nori is a genre of music that is a quintessentially South Korean creation.

      Dynamic Korea is animated by the question of how samul nori became a global music genre. In this book, I argue that samul nori’s rhythmic form has served as a critical site for cross-cultural musical encounters and its global journeys. This rhythm-based form has helped to draw in international fans with little prior knowledge of traditional Korean music or even of South Korea. Additionally, it has aided enthusiasts on their path to the actual learning and performance of Korean percussion music. In some extraordinary cases, it has served as a gateway for even more rigorous explorations of traditional Korean music and transformational life experiences.

      There are, of course, other factors that have contributed to the outward spread of samul nori to far-flung destinations. This book will consider some of those other factors, such as state support, circulation of recordings, the world music industry, and the development of musical notation. But it will invest more time reflecting on the dynamics of rhythmic form in relation to global samul nori. Born out of a collaborative musical experiment in the late 1970s, samul nori as a case study provides us with a special opportunity to witness the creation and development of a musical genre. Soon after its creation, the nascent samul nori genre began to be performed outside South Korea—first by way of international tours by the legendary SamulNori quartet, and then through imitation by amateur and semiprofessional percussion ensembles. Samul nori’s journey of globalization allows us to examine how rhythm-based forms can travel swiftly across boundaries. This rhythmic form, I posit, has been the key to its mobility. At first blush, framing this study in terms of musical form may seem unfashionable or even anachronistic. Why form, of all things? Let me explain.

       MUSICAL GLOBALIZATION

      Many important studies of global musics have shed light on the political, economic, institutional, or ideological issues that undergird music’s globalization. Scholars aptly turned their attention to the politically fraught issues that were imbricated with global music circulations, such as the Western music industry’s appropriation and exploitation of non-Western musical traditions in the creation of “world beat” or the “world music” genre (to name just a few, Feld 1988, 2000; Meintjes 1990; Garofalo 1993; Erlmann 1999). Along with this critique came critical Marxist and postcolonial readings of the production, circulation, and consumption of sonic and cultural difference in global markets (Taylor 1997; Erlmann 1996).

      Second, a significant number of scholars have also gravitated toward the “global-local” relational analytic in their work. To that end, dozens of studies of global music genres such as hip-hop, reggae, taiko, bhangra, and gamelan have explored diverse processes of localization, hybridization, and diaspora formation, often through a political lens.² Third, the question of cross-cultural “exotic” appeal has also been considered from multiple perspectives. Michelle Bigenho (2012) examined Japan’s courtship with Andean music, and recent ethnographies of American converts to Balkan music and Javanese gamelan identify a shared fascination with the distant sounds of non-Western music (Laušević 2007; Spiller 2015).

      When viewed as a whole, these common