Voices from the Straw Mat: Toward an Ethnography of Korean Story Singing

Preface

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . preface Chôngshim chôngým (Correct mind, correct sound) If you wish to be a good singer, you must first be a human being,” the elders said. This aphorism sums up the legacy left by my teacher Chông Kwônjin–sônsaengnim ,1 who could not overemphasize the essence of humanity as the fundamental strength in p’ansori, a story-singing tradition from premodern Korea. His prerequisite for the study of the Song of Shim Ch’ông was “that you fulfill your duty to your parents first. I’d rather you be a good daughter than a skilled singer.” Shim Ch’ông’s aria of filial sacrifice by self-annihilation would ring hollow if I did not practice filial piety. The concept of a vocal manifestation of humanity echoes the saying from one of the five Confucian classical texts that in order to assess the state of affairs of a country, one need only listen to its current music.2 I felt sufficiently intrigued by the idea of a voice-person reciprocity, that singing extends beyond a mere musical function to represent the singer and that the voice is the distillation of the person situated in an ethical and aesthetic matrix. In the allegory of the seven blind men fumbling to understand an elephant’s existence , I may be yet the eighth, questioning its voice rather than its trunk, legs, skin, or ear flaps. In today’s interdisciplinary field of the humanities, ethnography itself is arguably “a genre of storytelling,”3 and I present yet another tale of a blind quest for p’ansori whose ultimate destination is vocal transparency analyzed historically and embodied in performance. Life is seeming chaos until a larger picture emerges and reveals hidden connections , as with my entanglement with p’ansori. Growing up in Seoul in the aftermath of the Korean War, I received my first vocal training from popular tunes of displacement, separation, and homesickness interspersed with occasional airings of traditional folk songs on the radio. In middle school, my engagement with singing shifted suddenly, along with the new set of uniforms, friends, rules, and curricula, and I was no longer eager to participate in the weekly choral class. The culprit in my disenchantment was my own husky voice refusing to accommodate the Western classical falsetto realm, imposed as part of a colonial education policy that persists as standard vocal practice in Korea. My involvement in theannualproductionsofEnglishmusicalsincollegerehabilitatedmyinterest in singing. In the summer of 1974, my affair with American folk tunes and other . . . . . . x : Preface manifestations of counterculture circulating on college campuses came to an abruptendwhenIstumbledinto theworld ofp’ansori. Located onthe third floor of a small building in front of Piwôn, Secret Garden Palace, was the Kim Sohýi Studio,4 where Kim Kyônghýi,5 the younger sister in the family, in her tiny room attached to the back, helped open my ears to an art that was distant yet familiar. Let them be, leave worldly affairs be. Do you not see the peach blossoms in the East Garden bloom and wither with spring transiency? (From the tan’ga P’yônsich’un) I was struck by the stark earthiness in her raspy voice vividly visualizing the poetry in motion and in a tongue modernity had long pronounced dead. Humbly I began my search and my research. Korea in the 1970s was a “development”-driven society, spurred by the determination to emerge from poverty and move from “underdeveloped” to “developing ” status. Yet through a whirlwind of technological advancement and Western popular culture, the deep-rooted Neo-Confucian social hierarchy continued to assert its taboos. Despite government-level preservation of the dying tradition, folk performance was suffering a double jeopardy: traditional disdain for the arts and artists, on the one hand, and public indoctrination in imported aesthetics, on the other. In Confucian Korea, the “folk” and the “native” have long been equated with the crude and commonplace. P’ansori in particular was shunned by “respectable society,” particularly since its artistry builds on the dialectsof Chôlla,whichtraditionallyhave beenconspicuouslystigmatized.6 Where such sociolinguistic preconceptions exist, p’ansori may appear to be more an anti-intellectual statement than an instrumental or kinesthetic species whose origins are often obscured in nonverbal expression. Perhaps in the face of prejudice , the singers fiercely defended the art’s socio-intellectual raison d’être by infusing the narratives with Confucian high morals, namely, samgang oryun, “the three bonds and five human relations.”7 Despite the surging political and...