Space and the Big Bang

In actuality, Konggan [Space] did not embark only to explain Korea to the Koreans; it was its ceaseless wish, too, to explain Korea to other countries.

Alain Delissen, 2001

SamulNori became SamulNori Hanullim, Inc. (Hanullim means big bang) in 1993. This growth from a four-man performance ensemble into a company of thirty artists meant that SamulNori's new genre in traditional Korean arts, music, and dance over the last two decades had now also become a viable educational and research enterprise.

SamulNori Hanullim, n.d.

In 1993 the SamulNori quartet officially disbanded, ending their remarkable run. As many histories of the group narrate, the quartet began as a modest experiment in 1978 and developed unexpectedly into a global musical phenomenon. Few could have predicted this rise, or this spread. Within the span of fifteen years SamulNori claimed over thirty-five hundred performances. They were credited with catapulting their brand of music into South Korea's sonic landscape as the country's representative genre of kugak (literally, "national [Korean] music"). Their success on international stages spurred a reappraisal of the status of traditional Korean arts on a domestic front. And the music that the quartet performed was soon embraced and imitated by many fans both within and outside South Korea.

But as is sometimes the case with things that have a steep and sudden ascent, the ending can be abrupt. Typically glossed over in SamulNori narratives or confined to the domains of conversation and hearsay, such difficulties as internal strife, conflicting agendas, financial disputes, and burnout all factored into the dissolution of the SamulNori quartet. This did not lead to the demise of samul nori as a genre, however. To the contrary, it was during the 1990s that the genre of samul nori flourished. A growing base of fans became samul nori practitioners, owing in large part to pedagogical outreach efforts sponsored first by the quartet, and later by samul nori's most tireless and ambitious advocate, Kim Duk Soo.

Master of the hourglass changgo drum, Kim Duk Soo took up the reins and launched a reconfigured and expanded enterprise in 1993, calling it SamulNori Hanullim. Translated literally, hanullim means "grand reverberation"; Kim Duk Soo chose to render this in English as SamulNori "Big Bang." Broadening his artistic horizons, Kim presided as the director for an organization that featured a roster of samul nori quartet "teams," an educational division, and a managing staff.

The transformation from a stand-alone quartet to an artistic troupe capable of deploying separate teams to different events reflects the popularization of the percussion genre by the early 1990s. Not only was there an increased demand for samul nori performances, but there was also a younger generation of musicians who had essentially become adept (and even fanatic) at playing samul nori. The quartet attracted serious musicians and amateur enthusiasts — many of whom flocked to train with the quartet members at workshops or at the Sinch'on Live House Nanjang Studio. Ethnomusicologist Nathan Hesselink describes the quartet's impact in even broader terms: "By the 1990s, SamulNori / samul nori in various incarnations had become a prominent fixture of the Korean musical landscape, seen on television broadcasts and in concert halls, disseminated on CD, VHS, and DVD recordings, studied in chapters of music history and appreciation textbooks, and taught at the primary, secondary, and collegiate levels throughout the peninsula" (2012, 3). Thus Kim's SamulNori "Big Bang" was a fitting appellation to describe the longer-lasting reverberations of the SamulNori quartet, while at the same time forecasting Kim's more ambitious agendas.

Beginning this story with the quartet's demise is an unconventional narrative move. But it strategically foregrounds SamulNori's popular reception — a reception that outlived the quartet's dissolution. It shifts the emphasis away from SamulNori the quartet to samul nori the global music genre. It also offers another way of thinking of SamulNori — not as a singular, all-star quartet that emerged fully formed overnight — but as part of an evolving musical collaboration and a cultural project. As many Korean music insiders already know, what is usually referred to as the first or "original SamulNori quartet" is actually a misnomer.

The quartet's membership was never truly fixed, as the "original" designation suggests. One of the founding members, Kim Yong-bae [Kim Yongbae], left the quartet in 1984 when he was recruited by the National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts (now known as the National Gugak Center) to establish its own in-house samul nori quartet. Kim was replaced by Kang Min-seok [Kang Minsok]. And Choi Jong Sil [Ch'oe Chongsil] departed the group in 1989 in order to pursue academic studies. Because of the fluid membership of the group — even from the first performances at the Space Theater — it is problematic to liberally use the term "original" (see Hesselink 2012, 56–57). Viewing the quartet less as a fixed entity and more as a collaborative project that involved numerous individuals and membership changes over time will be instructive here.

Dynamic Korea hews closely to the book's animating question of how a musical genre goes global. While this chapter chronicles some of the early history of the SamulNori quartet, it does so for the purpose of bringing into relief the social and cultural environment that facilitated the quartet's emergence and development at a specific moment in South Korean history. And since early accounts of the SamulNori quartet already exist, I direct readers with interest in finer historical details to monographs in both Korean and English (Kim Honson 1988, [1991] 1994, 1995, 1998; Hesselink 2012; Howard 2015; SamulNori Hanullim t'ansaeng samsip chunyon kinyom saophoe 2009). I also base my analysis of samul nori's global journeys through two groups in particular: the SamulNori quartet and SamulNori Hanullim. The stories of professional samul nori groups such as Durae Pae SamulNori, Dulsori, and Samul Gwangdae — while important in the context of samul nori's globalization — are not featured here.

In this chapter I begin with a description of the setting — the Seoul-based Konggan Sarang and the community of cultural activists who nurtured what I call the SamulNori project. This is followed by my examination of the ways in which the sounds of samul nori first captivated listeners. Through careful analysis of ethnographic interviews, oral histories, and the accounts of music critics and fans, I reveal the strands of the positive reception that eventually led to the outward spread of the genre and the South...