Korea and the Western Drumset: Scattering Rhythms by Simon Barker (review)

A brave attempt at ‘offering improvisers a template for engaging with traditional forms of rhythmic organisation’ (p. 99), professional percussionist Simon Barker’s approach to musicoidiolectic encounters of the proverbial East, via embodied instrumental practices of the wouldbe West, is a resource-rich and helpful volume.

A preliminary question here may be how and why did Korean percussion and jazz drumming come to be marriage partners in the first place? Barker hints at his own unique journey of discovery as a performer, via happenstance and personal interest. However, broader impetuses—if not articulated directly by the author himself—are also important to consider. While narratives of musical encounters with the Other stereotypically pit the so-called ‘Orient’ against the ‘West’ by looking at hybridized mainstream cultures such as Western art music’s fascination with Chinoiserie, or—crudely put—Anglo-American pop’s integration with non-Western urban forms (e.g. Afrobeat and K-pop), Barker’s deliberate consideration of non-mainstream genres such as jazz and Korean folk, art, and shamanic percussion allows us dramatically to recalibrate recalibrate playing fields: what are the default frames of reference here in the cultural and musical translation process? More vital here is also the fact that the usual dynamics of appropriative play in histories of cultural globalization are inverted: Western drumset is subject to as much Koreanization (p. 2) as possible, rather than the other way around.

Barker’s volume is organized clearly, if simply. Chapters 1 and 2 recall previous research in the field of musical adaptation in the percussion world, as well as recent histories of drumming in Korean. Discussions of the latter, while not encyclopedic, cover wide ground, ranging from farmers’ nong-ak music, to p’ansori opera accompaniment, to community pungmul drumming sessions, to staged samulnori performances and shamanic mudang-style percussion genres. Most of the important analytical work, including an examination of adaptation strategies, is carried out in chapters 3 and 4 by modelling well-known pieces in the Korean drumming repertory.

To be sure, this volume does not narrate the making of a fusion project. Rather, it focuses on the simpler aim of adapting finely detailed transliterations of Korean rhythms for the Western drum-set, using analytical and performance tropes from jazz (and to some extent Korean rhythmic theories). The invocation of Korean changdan in comparison to Birdland Simmons’s notion of ‘rhythmic keys’ (pp. 14–15) is particularly useful, unveiling transcultural approaches to rhythms as chains of predetermined, repeated, interchanging, and interweaving subdivisions of pulsations. Barker further explores this analogy in interaction with Greg Shehaan’s concept of ‘number diamonds’ (p. 63), where meta structures of rhythm are constructed through mixing and matching metric archetypes, and subjected to staggered ornamentation, superimposition, and serial amplification.

Barker’s own bold invention of a new sticking system adapting physical drum-set technique (and accompanying modified nomenclature) to Korean textual content is also an important contribution. It reveals different, if equivalent, cognitive-interpretative approaches to playing and listening to superficially identical rhythms on culturally and timbrally distinct instruments. A Korean kiduk stroke, for example, is exposed variously as a flam rudiment, and later—in printed form—as an acciaccatura. Elsewhere, the physical and creative challenges of compacting a four-man band into a single-kit drumming unit is touched upon in discussions of composite embodiment as well as foot technique, although some of these could have been taken further. For example, an investigation of ‘handedness’—especially in the reversal of dominant-hand sticking in adapting changgo to drum-set technique—could have satisfied the curiosity of this reader. Still, taken together, these analytical aspects of an otherwise slim theoretical preface build towards the collation of the most valuable elements of Barker’s undertaking: meticulously scored notations, in turn realized and demonstrated in a treasure-trove of virtuosic, high-energy recordings on the accompanying CD and DVD.

The value of the book might perhaps...