What's That Sound?: Korean Fusion Music and the Ascendancy of the Haegŭm

In the last 20 years, musicians specializing in the performance of Korean traditional music (kugak) have been drawn in increasing numbers to participate in hybrid musical combinations of Korean instruments, vocal styles, and repertory with music originating in other parts of the world—primarily, but not exclusively, the West. What Korean musicians produce under the general rubric of "fusion music" (p'yujŏn ŭmak)¹ is often immediately recognizable as Korean not so much from musical form, melody, or even from rhythmic pattern, as from instrumental timbre.² The issue of timbre has often appeared in the scholarship on Korean music, especially in writings identifying the unique qualities of Korean traditional music. Lee Byong Won (Yi Pyŏngwŏn)³ states flatly that "A kind of raspy or buzzing sound quality seems to be the preferred timbre in Korean music" (1997, 53), from the "extremely raspy" sound of the p'ansori singer's and Southwestern folksinger's voices to a wide variety of Korean instruments: the raspy sound of the bowed zither (ajaeng), the two-stringed fiddle (haegŭm) and the double reeds (p'iri and t'aep'yŏngso), the "dark," "rough," "scraping and scratching" (Lee Byong Won 1997, 55) sounds of the 6-stringed plucked zither (kŏmun'go), to the "buzzy" sound of the side-blown flute (taegŭm), and the "piercing," "trebly" sound of the small flat gong (kkwaenggwari) and the upper-register playing of t'aep'yŏngso and haegŭm. There are whole chapters or sections thereof on timbre in Lee Byong Won's Styles and Esthetics in Korean Traditional Music (1997) and in So Inhwa's (Sŏ Inhwa) Theoretical Perspectives on Korean Traditional Music: An Introduction (2002), among others. It would seem, therefore, that careful attention should be paid to timbre in the new forms of Korean music emerging in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Korea's increasingly prominent fusion music.

Hybridity has become an increasingly central concern of much contemporary scholarship in ethnomusicology, but scholars of Korean music, with the notable exception of Lee So Young (Yi Soyŏng) (1999, 2003, 2005a, 2005b), Song Hyejin (2000), Yun Chunggang (2004), Chŏn Chiyŏng (2004), and Keith Howard (2002), have had relatively little to say about the recent surge of fusion music, and even less about the role of timbre in fusion music. Korea's indigenous stringed, wind, and percussion instruments all have distinctive timbres, but it is the timbre of the 2-string fiddle haegŭm, with its often raspy, trebly, and penetrating timbre, that has taken a dominant role as the quintessential Korean "sound" in contemporary fusion music.⁴ In a survey of 55 recent fusion CD albums, I found 30 with haegŭm playing and, among these, 15 in which the haegŭm is the lead instrument on all or most tracks. (Please see Appendix 1 for a listing of recent CD albums featuring haegŭm.) And of the 9 haegŭm players on fusion albums, 8 are women.⁵ The only male is Kim Yŏngjae, whose album includes a few fusion pieces, but also arrangements of traditional folk songs and a traditional haegŭm sanjo.⁶

Looking at the broad terrain of Korean music, but with a focus on fusion, music critic and broadcaster Yun Chunggang (2004) has been so bold as to suggest that the 20th century was the kayagŭm century, but the 21st century is becoming the haegŭm century. (The 19th century was, he says, the kŏmun'go century.) New compositions for haegŭm have appeared in recent years more frequently than previously, but most importantly haegŭm has become a mainstay in many fusion music groups.⁷

My focus on haegŭm stems not only from the fact of its widespread usage, but also from my own surprise at what struck me as a stylistic clash between the predominantly soft and subdued sounds so prominent in much fusion music (especially "new-age" fusion), and the penetrating sound of the haegŭm, which is so often featured as the...