Bands, Songs, and Shamanistic Rituals: Folk Music in Korean Society

Description

»There is a lack of publications about Korean folk music in English and, amongst established Korean music scholars, there has been considerable work done on the analysis of music sound, but a virtual avoidance of musical context—details about the places where music was performed, who performed it, and what occasions they performed it for. At the other extreme, Korean folk scholars have begun to assemble an impressive data base about oral culture, witnessed in the now-defunct Chont’ong munhwa and Madang magazines and the publications of the Academy of Korean Studies (Han’guk chöngshin munhwa yon’guwön). Folk scholars tend not to consider musical sound. To people familiar with the development of social anthropology or comparative musicology, when "fieldwork" once involved a social scientist living in a community recording the minutiae of daily interaction, and when a musicologist interpreted recordings resulting from this study in some distant university, the Korean situation may sound all too familiar. I believe that music is a social fact and needs to be studied in a way that considers both context and sound, that is, both process and product (after Blacking 1969). In this study I consequently attempt to bridge the gap between folklore and music. I am an ethnomusicologist, and so this is a book about music, not a book of music.« (From the introduction)