Music of Korea eds. by Byong Won Lee and Yong-Shik Lee (review)

The National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts (also known as the National Gugak Center) in Seoul has been publishing the Korean Musicology Series, a series of academic books on Korean performing arts since 2007, which currently includes seven publications on music, dance, and performance in general. Music of Korea is the first in the series, providing an overview of Korean traditional music, and is followed by four more detailed musical texts: Sanjo (2008), Pansori (2009), Musical Notations of Korea (2010), and Korean Folk Song, Arirang (2012). The two most recent publications are introductory overviews: Dance of Korea (2014) and Yeonhui, Korean Performing Arts (2015). The next title planned in the series is on court music.

Music in Korea is an excellent introduction and overview of traditional music of Korea presented in a clear logical manner, with a degree of detail that provides a cursory understanding of the material without getting overwhelmed in Korean terminology. The book opens with a dozen pages of color pictures of traditional musical instruments followed by a series of articles by prominent international and Korean scholars such as Byong Won Lee, Hee-sun Kim, Inok Paek, Nathan Hesselink, Keith Howard, and Yong-Shik Lee (in order of appearance).

After a brief history of Korea, the chapters are organized to describe court, classical, folk, professional, religious, and contemporary musics. Except for the latter two subjects each category has a separate article on vocal and instrumental music. As Confucian music is considered one of the three forms of Korean court music, the articles under the religious music category discuss only Buddhism and shamanism.

There is a consistency of voice throughout all the articles. They are all clear, concise, descriptive, and comprehensive. The numerous charts, texts, musical transcriptions, and other examples are very helpful in absorbing a large amount of information quickly, especially with the volume of Korean terminology. The information is presented from an international scholarly perspective, providing a balanced tone without regional bias.

The articles primarily focus on factual information, of which there is a lot to digest. Unfortunately, the text is without an index or a glossary, and with the large amount of Korean text, either or both of these would have been an asset. This is the case for subsequent books in the series as well, which overall contain limited discussions of aesthetics, style, and historical evolution.

In an introductory text such as this there are many topics that are understandably too broad to be discussed. Instrumental techniques, for instance, are briefly touched on in Music of Korea but are expanded on in the publications Sanjo and Pansori. Similarly, the Korean rhythmic system jangdan is briefly discussed in various relevant sections of Music of Korea, as in the section on pansori, and further discussed in the Pansori volume itself. The subject is large and complex, since jangdan plays an integral part in many genres and has a wide variety of regional variations. In fact, a thorough book devoted to jangdan itself would be a useful addition to the series.

Equally complex and fundamental to Korean music is the modal system of tori, which includes the deep vibrato and falling tones that are so distinctive in many forms. Transcriptions and brief discussion of modes are found in various articles in Music of Korea, and again in the fourth book of the series, Musical Notations of Korea. A discussion of tori, its history and development, and its regional variations deserves to be the subject of a future book as well.

The companion DVD to Music of Korea contains high-quality videos of modern stage performances of the representative styles for each article. The one exception is the video of shamanic music, which is an excerpt of an actual gut, or ritual performance.

All of the publications in the...