Dynamic Korea and Rhythmic Form by Katherine In-Young Lee (review)

Before K-pop became South Korea's trendiest musical export, there was samul nori (literally "four things play"), a stirring neotraditional drum-and-gong genre (Lee, 2). Not long after its inception in 1978, professional samul nori ensembles began to tour international world-music circuits. Amateur groups then began to sprout up in far-flung locations, sometimes seeded by Korean diasporic communities and sometimes formed by non-Korean enthusiasts. In her highly anticipated monograph Dynamic Korea and Rhythmic Form, Katherine In-Young Lee asks the simple yet productive question of how a rhythm-based form such as samul nori became a global music sensation. In this way, Lee strategically nests her inquiry within larger debates about the globalization and circulation of world music and thus appeals to a broader audience.

Samul nori has already received some scholarly attention, most pertinently in the form of full-length monographs in English by ethnomusicologists Nathan Hesselink (2012) and Keith Howard (2015). As laid out in her introduction, Lee builds on this body of work and carefully crafts a unique approach that differs from those of Hesselink and Howard in several ways. Most significantly, Lee focuses a great deal more on reception—both domestic and global—in keeping with her central inquiry into why samul nori went global. Although she did interview many key South Korean founders and performers of the genre, she also conducted multisited fieldwork with samul nori participants in Mexico, Japan, the United States, France, and Belgium and interacted with international participants at the 2008 World SamulNori Festival and Competition. Through a combination of carefully grounded ethnography, archival research, and analysis, Lee further distinguishes her approach by teasing out a compelling analytic for the entire book, proposing that samul nori's dynamic nature and rhythm-based form are central to its transnational mobility. Although Howard and Hesselink also pay productive attention to form, Lee grounds her inquiry in a concise and elegant engagement with the literature on musical globalization, citing the neglect of musical form in this literature as a potential opportunity to carve out new territory. In further honing her ideas about form, Lee effectively incorporates affordance theory and tangles with legitimate criticisms of form-driven analysis by musicologists and ethnomusicologists. Ultimately, she settles on a familiar but satisfying approach that is a "variation on an old music-analytical theme: form and ethnographic analysis" (7).

Given her background, Lee is uniquely situated to write an ethnographic monograph about the globalization of samul nori, especially one that focuses on one of the earliest and best-known members, Kim Duk Soo (Kim Tŏksu), and his performing organization, SamulNori Hanullim. In the early 2000s, Lee worked for SamulNori Hanullim as overseas coordinator and tour manager. She drew on this networking experience to interview numerous SamulNori Hanullim members as well as many collaborators and enthusiasts abroad during her fieldwork research year and beyond. Although it is always challenging to write ethnography about an artist or organization with which one has had a working relationship of advocacy, such a situation is certainly not new in ethnomusicology. In general, Lee navigates this well-worn terrain with nuance, restraint, and evenhandedness and is careful not to overstate the larger-than-life influence of Kim Duk Soo; that is, this is not and does not aspire to be a no-holds-barred, "thick" ethnography of the inner workings of the SamulNori Hanullim organization.

As is the case with many ethnographies, chapter 1 sets the stage for the study, centering on the history and formation of samul nori and focusing on the SamulNori quartet. But true to her analytic of dynamism, Lee's narrative emphasizes SamulNori's dynamic process of repertoire formation and fluid early membership, going so far as to frame their initial...