SamulNori

Contemporary Korean Drumming and the Rebirth of Itinerant Performance Culture

Hesselink Nathan

In 1978, four musicians crowded into a cramped basement theater in downtown Seoul, where they, for the first time, brought the rural percussive art of p'ungmul to a burgeoning urban audience. In doing so, they began a decades-long reinvention of tradition, one that would eventually create an entirely new genre of music and a national symbol for Korean culture.

Nathan Hesselink's "SamulNori" traces this reinvention through the rise of the Korean supergroup of the same name, analyzing the strategies the group employed to transform a museum-worthy musical form into something that was both contemporary and historically authentic, unveiling an intersection of traditional and modern cultures and the inevitable challenges such a mix entails. Providing everything from musical notation to a history of urban culture in South Korea to an analysis of SamulNori's teaching materials and collaborations with Euro-American jazz quartet Red Sun, Hesselink offers a deeply researched study that highlights the need for traditions – if they are to survive – to embrace both preservation and innovation.

Reviews

"This book-length study of Korea's super-group, SamulNori, is long overdue. The book is original both in its subject matter and in the way the author approaches the subject matter, presenting translation of authoritative Korean scholarship, transcripts of interviews, personal opinion, and careful musical analysis. Even in Korean, such a book has yet to be published" – R. Anderson Sutton, University of Wisconsin

"Hesselink documents with great subtlety the human agency of actors determined to keep a rural musical tradition relevant and exciting in the modern city, a process going on nearly every place in the world since World War II. He focuses on what is arguably Korea's most dynamic and engaging musical export, the ensemble SamulNori and the new genre it spawned (also called samul nori). The author also challenges us to think anew about such well-worn concepts as tradition, modernity, and musical hybridity and fusion" – Timothy Rice, University of California, Los Angeles

Back to the list of books