Korean Music: Its History and its Performance (review)

BOOK REVIEWS101 pedantic regularity he adds an exclamation mark. One must ask here: does the Korean language, which is so rich in emphatical suffixes, need such decoration? With any other punctuation the author is far less pedantic. In the Chinese edition some dashes are used, which normally indicate a pause, and sometimes a three-dot line is used, which normally indicates endless thoughts and associations . However, these punctuations are used irregularly and without any sense to them, and in the Korean edition we can find only lines of points, and no dashes. For example, one line in the Chinese edition is printed "boom-boom—" (p. 80), whereas the Korean edition reads" boom-boom ..." (p. 97). In poetry more than in prose, every little word and each punctuation mark may indicate an important semantic change. Thus such an arbitrary style can be misleading to the careful reader. A clear line of development in the direction of an independent Korean literature in China can be seen starting with the older poetry of other Yanbian authors and ending with Kim P'a. In the late fifties, Zhou Yang, one of the leading ideologists and an instigator of the Cultural Revolution, wrote in the first issue of the magazine Hongqi [Red Flag]: "Literature should be the union of revolutionary realism with revolutionary romanticism." Three decades later Liu Zaifu, the unorthodox director of the Literature Institute of the Academy of Social Sciences, responded in a September 1986 speech, printed in the Renmin Ribao [People's daily], announcing that "literature has broken its claims of being the instrument of class conflict and of being a tool of politics." It is clear that Kim P'a's poetry falls almost exactly between these two theories. Maybe in the future this young and optimistic author will be favorably remembered for this. Frank Hoffmann Universität Tübingen Korean Music: Its History and its Performance, by Keith Pratt. Seoul: Jung Eum Sa [Chöngüm-sa] Publishing, and London: Faber Music, 1987. 279 pp. Music, photographs, bibliography , index, and accompanying cassette tape. 20,000 won (in Korea only); £45. This book is the fourth in a series of five English-language texts on traditional Korean music published with UNESCO sponsorship; it is the only one issued in conjunction with a publisher outside Korea. Presented in a box containing a book and a tape, it is lavishly illustrated with 142 plates and a number of black-and-white photographs. I can imagine, though perhaps I shouldn't, Korean businessmen bringing it to the West as a gift for clients, particularly since its price in Korea is reasonable. The package contains a nicely produced cassette tape with twelve musical examples. This is a welcome addition, and makes the music which the author talks about come alive. However, who are the performers , and who recorded and produced the tape? Apart from its value as a source book for iconography, this work is not meant to be either thorough or full of 102BOOK REVIEWS fresh scholarly material about Korean music culture. I wonder if Faber has not priced it rather high as a result. The introduction defines where the volume's value lies: The principal purpose of this book . . . is to present an artistic impression of Korean music and some visual evidence on which historians may base further research, (p. 16) For the first time we have a comprehensive set of plates showing old instruments and iconography. (Plates 16-42) Such a collection has long been needed, although even this is not complete, as the author admits, (p. 17) Fifteen photographs of contemporary performance are included (Plates 1-16), which could well have been omitted. There are also several minor errors: Plate 11 is credited to the wrong photographer and is said to depict a shaman ritual from Cheju when it is from Chindo. Plates 48, 49, and 50 are positioned wrongly, so that "detail of the above" should read "below." I also wonder why a shaman dance is given as a "folk version" (Plate 12): surely shamanism is a part of folk culture anyway. Documentation is excellent, except that even well-known performers who appear in photographs are not named. Background information...