What's That Sound?: Korean Fusion Music and the Ascendancy of the Haegŭm

Abstract

In the last 20 years, musicians specializing in the performance of Korean tradi tional (kugak) have been drawn in increasing numbers to participate in hybrid musical combinations of Korean instruments, vocal styles, and repertory with originating in other parts of the world?primarily, but not exclu sively, the West. What Korean musicians produce under the general rubric of music (p'yuj?n ?mak)1 is often immediately recognizable as Korean not so much from musical form, melody, or even from rhythmic pattern, as from instrumental timbre.2 The issue of timbre has often appeared in the scholar ship on Korean music, especially in writings identifying the unique qualities of Korean traditional music. Lee Byong Won (Yi Py?ngw?n)3 states flatly that A kind of or buzzing sound quality seems to be the preferred timbre in Korean music (1997, 53), from the extremely raspy sound of the pdnsori singers and Southwestern folksinger s voices to a wide variety of Korean instru ments: the sound of the bowed zither (ajaeng), the two-stringed fiddle (haeg?m) and the double reeds (p'iri and taepy?ngso), the dark, rough, scrap ing and scratching (Lee Byong Won 1997,55) sounds of the 6-stringed plucked zither (k?mungo), to the buzzy sound of the side-blown flute (taeg?m), and the piercing, trebly sound of the small flat gong (kkwaenggwari) and the upper-register playing of taepy?ngso and haeg?m. There are whole chapters or sections thereof on timbre in Lee Byong Wons Styles and Esthetics in Korean Traditional Music (1997) and in So Inhwas (So Inhwa) Theoretical Perspectives on Korean Traditional Music: An Lntroduction (2002), among others. It would seem, therefore, that careful attention should be paid to timbre in the new forms of Korean emerging in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Koreas increasingly prominent fusion music. Hybridity has become an increasingly central concern of much contempo rary scholarship in ethnomusicology, but scholars of Korean music, with the notable exception of Lee So Young (Yi Soy?ng) (1999, 2003, 2005a, 2005b), Song Hyejin (2000), Yun Chunggang (2004), Ch?n Chiy?ng (2004), and Keith Howard (2002), have had relatively little to say about the recent surge of fusion music, and even less about the role of timbre in fusion music. Koreas indig enous stringed, wind, and percussion instruments all have distinctive timbres,