In SamulNori: Contemporary Korean Drumming and the Rebirth of Itinerant Performance Culture, Nathan Hesselink provides an insightful history, ethnography, and musicological analysis of the Korean super-group SamulNori and the musical genre (also named samul nori) that they created. Providing a detailed look at SamulNori’s formation, history, music, teaching materials, and collaborative efforts, he examines the group within the larger context of the urbanization of South Korea. He further provides evidence for viewing SamulNori—which has been decried by some scholars as an urban “contamination” of traditional music—as “the rebirth and logical outgrowth of the namsadang [Korean itinerant performers]” and one possible model for a conceptualization of tradition that allows for change and fluidity (6, 8).
The book is divided into five chapters (plus an introduction, conclusion, and appendices) and comes with a CD containing several tracks of SamulNori’s solo and collaborative efforts. The first chapter describes the Korean itinerant performance culture of the namsadang, who enjoyed great popularity from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Hesselink places the namsadang troupes—who traveled throughout Korea performing music and acrobatics in various villages—at the forefront of trends toward professionalization and presentational (rather than participatory) music making. The second chapter provides further information about the social climate in which SamulNori came about, discussing urbanization in South Korea, the rise of concert-hall culture, and the increased acceptance and popularity of folk musics during the early 1970s. Chapter 3 examines SamulNori’s use of traditional elements, using the rhythmic cycle known as Och’ae chilgut as an example to show the adaptations they made in order to bring the rural traditional music of the namsadang to the city and, eventually, to take it outside of Korea. Hesselink shows how the group was able to preserve traditional elements while making something new and relevant to contemporary audiences. The fourth chapter examines how SamulNori incorporated East Asian cosmology—particularly the concept of won-pang-kak (circle/heaven-square/earth-triangle/humankind)—in their pedagogical materials, providing a further link toward East Asian tradition at a time characterized by many as one of increasing Westernization. The final chapter examines SamulNori’s collaborative albums with the European-American jazz group Red Sun, looking at the power relations within the two groups’ four collaborative albums and showing how this collaboration succeeded in creating “a safe forum for the interaction of different musical and cultural identities” (130). Finally, Hesselink concludes the book with a discussion about how SamulNori provides an alternative to more traditional, cultural-asset oriented views of tradition by showing how traditional elements and styles can be preserved in a way that is relevant for contemporary performers and listeners and allows for innovation and creativity.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about this book is Hesselink’s use of many different approaches and modes of inquiry to provide a multifaceted view of SamulNori’s genesis, impact, relationship to the namsadang, and use of tradition. Whether he is translating and commenting upon authoritative South Korean texts, providing a musicological analysis of Och’ae chilgut, synthesizing historical data about concert venues from the 1970s, examining musicological and production details of collaborative recordings in SamulNori’s collaborative albums, or drawing upon interview data and his own considerable performance experience, Hesselink is able to blend together information from disparate sources in a way that quite successfully contextualizes SamulNori, grounding them in a particular place and time as an extension of a particular itinerant performance tradition while still allowing the agency and creativity of the band members to shine through.
While stated as one of the major themes of the book, and indeed present throughout, Hesselink’s commentary upon and critique of tradition (particularly the cultural asset systems used in many places in East Asia and by agencies such as UNESCO) does not really come to fruition until the end of the book. Despite the late appearance and brevity of his actual critique, Hesselink’s argument against cultural asset systems, which “can easily serve as an apparatus for hegemonic interests that threaten differing perspectives and individual voices” in favor of a more SamulNori-like approach that draws upon aspects of the past, while allowing for things such as individual creativity and syncretism, is interesting to consider, and most certainly a welcome addition to the continuing discussion in fields such as folklore, anthropology, and ethnomusicology about tradition and intangible cultural heritage (134).
In sum, Hesselink provides an in-depth and yet far-reaching study of SamulNori and the genre of music they created that manages to ground the group as a modern-day continuation of the namsadang tradition, a product of the urbanization and growing concert-hall culture of 1970s South Korea and (perhaps most importantly) the creativity of individuals and groups in collaboration. Hesselink also contributes to larger discussions of tradition and the preservation of heritage that question the ways we approach what we consider to be traditional and how these things should be preserved, while remaining relevant and allowing for artistic creativity.
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[Review length: 800 words • Review posted on October 31, 2012]