Hwang Byungki: Traditional Music and the Contemporary Composer in the Republic of Korea

Andrew Killick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409420309
• eBook ISBN: 9781351929356
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Folk Music

Anyone who knows anything of Korean music probably knows something of Hwang Byungki. As a composer, performer, scholar, and administrator, Hwang has had an exceptional influence on the world of Korean traditional music for over half a century. During that time, Western-style music (both classical and popular) has become the main form of musical expression for most Koreans, while traditional music has taken on a special role as a powerful emblem of national identity. Through analysis of Hwang's life and works, this book addresses the broader question of traditional music's place in a rapidly modernizing yet intensely nationalistic society, as well as the issues faced by a composer working in an idiom in which the very concept of the individual composer was not traditionally recognized. It explores how new music for traditional instruments can provide a means of negotiating between a local identity and the modern world order. This is the first book in English about an Asian composer who writes primarily for traditional instruments. Following a thematic rather than a rigidly chronological approach, each chapter focuses on a particular area of interest or activity-such as Hwang's unique position in the traditional genre kayagum sanjo, his enduring interest in Buddhist culture and a meditative aesthetic, and his adoption of extended techniques and approaches from Western avant-garde music-and includes in-depth analysis of selected works, excerpts from which are provided on downloadable resources. The book draws on 25 years of personal acquaintance and study with Hwang Byungki as well as experience in playing his music.

Chapter 1
Hwang Byungki as Traditional Musician: Kayagŭm Sanjo

Hwang Byungki had been playing the kayagŭm for over ten years before he started to compose, and he has continued to perform traditional kugak as well as his own compositions professionally throughout his career. Indeed, his expertise in performance has profoundly affected his approach to composition, enabling him to write music that lies naturally under the hand and effectively exploits the capabilities of the kayagŭm, whereas most ch’angjak kugak composers have had to consult performers for advice on writing idiomatically for kugak instruments (Lee Chaesuk 2008b: 49–50; Kim Hee-sun 2008b: 83). While Hwang has learned to perform various forms of traditional Korean music, the genre that has provided the mainstay of his repertory and the principal foundation for his compositional techniques is sanjo, a form of extended instrumental solo with drum accompaniment. Hwang has called sanjo “the highest form of Korean music aesthetics” (interview in Willoughby 2009: 103), and has expounded its aesthetics in a number of publications (e.g. 1974b; 2003; 2010b) as well as teaching and performing it regularly for over fifty years. An understanding of sanjo is essential to an understanding of Hwang’s music, for it allows us to see how he has both maintained and expanded the musical resources of the traditional genre.

At the same time, Hwang has developed his own approach to sanjo, one that is, in its turn, informed by his experience as a composer, and that has attracted much attention, not to say controversy, in the kugak world. At a time when most sanjo players were performing fixed versions that they had learned from their teachers, Hwang has performed, published and taught his own personal version of sanjo, and while this has met with resistance from those who felt that the creation of a new “school” of sanjo was no longer possible or appropriate in modern-day Korea, Hwang’s sanjo has been learned and performed by a number of younger players and seems likely to be accepted into the sanjo canon in time. Thus, Hwang’s career as a sanjo musician has an importance of its own besides its influence on his compositions, and this chapter seeks to assess both sanjo’s importance for Hwang and Hwang’s importance for sanjo. in doing so, it also raises issues about the relationship between creativity, tradition, and modernity for which Hwang’s music presents an illuminating test case, as I hope will be seen in different ways throughout the remainder of this book.

The chapter begins with an introduction to Hwang’s main instrument, the kayagŭm, and its re-fashioning in the nineteenth century into the instrument for which sanjo came to be created. This is followed by an introduction to the musical resources and aesthetics of the sanjo genre itself. We then review Hwang’s career as a sanjo player and teacher and the process by which he developed his own personal sanjo. Finally, we examine the product of that process, Chŏng Namhŭi-je Hwang Pyŏnggi-ryu kayagŭm sanjo (Kayagŭm sanjo of Chŏng Namhŭi—Hwang Byungki school), aiming to identify and account for its distinctive musical characteristics in relation to other versions of kayagŭm sanjo and to Hwang’s compositional output. The distinction that emerges between the traditional creative process that Hwang used in developing his own sanjo and the Western concept of “composition” that he adopted in his original works provides a starting point for examining the issues surrounding Korean traditional music as a vehicle for creativity, which will be of concern in subsequent chapters when we turn to Hwang’s work as a composer of new music for Korean traditional instruments.

Hwang's Instrument, the Kayagŭm

The kayagŭm belongs to a widespread East Asian family of instruments classified as half-tube zithers with movable bridges (Hornbostel and Schs 1961 [1914]: 22). Other members of the family include the Chinese zheng, Japanese koto, Mongolian yatga, and Vietnamese dan tranh. The “half-tube” refers to the elongated body of the instrument, which has a flat back and a convex soundboard, resembling a tube that has been sliced lengthways (though not exactly in “half,” since the curvature of the soundboard is much less than 180 degrees). Along this soundboard are stretched strings that pass over a fixed bridge at one end, with an arrangement for tightening and thus tuning the strings at the other. individual bridges are placed under each string, held against the soundboard by the string’s tension, and these can be readily moved to make fine adjustments to the tuning by lengthening or shortening the sounding length of the string. As these movable bridges are distributed in a diagonal line across the soundboard, the sounding length of the high-pitched strings is much less than that of the lower. The player’s right hand plucks the strings near the fixed bridge, while the left hand traditionally remains on the far side of the movable bridges, pressing or pulling the strings to vary their tension and thus produce slides, vibratos and other inflections of pitch. In modern compositions the left hand may pluck the strings too.

In the case of the kayagŭm (Figure 1.1), the soundboard is made of seasoned paulownia wood (odong namu in Korean) and left without lacquer or varnish to show the attractive natural grain. The strings are twelve in number and made of wound raw silk, in contrast to the metal or nylon strings now common on related instruments from other east Asian countries. They are kept relatively slack to facilitate the wide vibrato and pitch-bending characteristic of much Korean music. At the opposite end from the fixed bridge they are attached to thicker cords used for pulling and tightening the strings, and these are secured to a wooden extension whose distinctive shape inspired the name “ram’s horns” (yangidu). The right hand plucks the strings with the flesh of the index finger, middle finger, and thumb, without the picks or plectrums used on other related instruments, and even the fingernail is used only in a “flicking” technique when repeating a note previously plucked. The combination of silk strings, low tension, and bare fingers produces a sound that is warmer, more intimate, and less bright than that of most similar instruments.

Figure 1.1 Hwang Byungki playing the kayagŭm at his home in Seoul, 2008 (photograph by author).

The name kayagŭm tells its own story about the origins of the instrument, but it is a story we should not take too literally. The last part, kŭm/gŭm,¹ is the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese character 琴 which is also the name of a Chinese instrument, pronounced qin in Mandarin. The qin is also a half-tube zither, but it lacks movable bridges, and thus the closest Chinese relative of the kayagŭm is not the qin but the zheng. Kaya is the name of a federation of tribes that existed in the southern part of the Korean peninsula during the Three Kingdoms period (?–668) and was absorbed into one of those kingdoms, Silla, in the sixth century. The association of the name Kaya with the instrument traces back to the legend, first recorded in 1145, that the kayagŭm had been invented, on the model of the zheng but intentionally differentiated from it, by the last ruler of Kaya, King Kasil (Samguk sagi, chapter 32; translated in Song Bang-song 1980: 24–5). However, the archaeological record presents evidence of kayagŭm-like instruments, complete with the “ram’s horns” that distinguish the kayagŭm from other East Asian half-tube zithers, from as early as the beginning of the common era and from far beyond the territory of the Kaya federation (Howard et al. 2008: 24–6). Thus, it appears that while the name of the instrument means “qin from Kaya,” it is neither from Kaya nor a qin. The part of the legend that we can accept is that the kayagŭm emerged in the Three Kingdoms period as a Korean variant of the Chinese zheng.

¹ As with many Korean terms, the pronunciation and hence the romanization varies with the syllable’s position in a word. The initial consonant is voiced (g) when it comes between vowels or voiced consonants, unvoiced (k) elsewhere.

Though little documented, the kayagŭm appears to have maintained a continuous tradition on the Korean peninsula, and its fifteenth-century form was described and illustrated in detail in the treatise Akhak kwebŏm (Guide to the Study of Music, 1493). However, this was under the Confucian Chosŏn Dynasty, when the state valued Chinese civilization over indigenous Korean culture, and a name implying a Korean origin did nothing for an instrument’s prestige. Eventually the kayagŭm was dropped from state ritual music and from many secular court music ensembles, and acquired an association with the professional female entertainers called kisaeng (Howard et al. 2008: 21, 26–30). in its place, another half-tube zither, the kŏmun’go, was adopted as the preferred instrument of the Korean literati on the grounds of its supposed Chinese antecedents—ironically so since, with its raised frets and pencil-like plectrum, the kŏmun’go has far less claim to Chinese ancestry than the kayagŭm, and its closest relatives are actually the ja-khe of Thailand and the mì jaùń of Myanmar (Burma), as Hwang Byungki himself has pointed out (2001a). The kŏmun’go and kayagŭm have retained something of their traditional gender associations to this day, and still tend to be thought of as instruments for men and women respectively, although in practice there are plenty of musicians like Hwang who play the “opposite” gendered instrument.

Although overshadowed by the kŏmun’go, the kayagŭm retained a role in the repertory of chŏngak (“proper music”) that was performed for royal and aristocratic audiences. It was often included in the ensembles that performed instrumental suites or accompanied kagok songs. And because of the heterophonic texture of these genres, in which all the melodic instruments played variants of the same melody, the kayagŭm parts could also be performed solo. As had been the case throughout its history, it was exclusively in these elite circles that the kayagŭm was played.

Then, during the nineteenth century, a new form of kayagŭm and a new genre of kayagŭm music were developed. No one knows quite how or by whom, but the background appears to have been a trend in late Chosŏn social history whereby elite and folk culture came to be less rigidly separated and to interact more than in the past (Kim Yongok 2010: 6–7). The traditional class barriers had become more permeable because a rise in commercial activity had enabled merchants of commoner status to accumulate wealth and even to purchase titles of aristocratic yangban rank (Lee Ki-baik 1984: 250–51). One symptom of the change can be seen in the upward mobility of the musical storytelling genre p’ansori. P’ansori had begun as a folk performing art of Korea’s southwestern provinces, but in the nineteenth century it acquired patrons of all social classes and regions, and as a result was transformed by the addition of elements from the elite culture in both words and music (Pihl 1994: 31–40; Park Chan E. 2003: 56–84).

The new kayagŭm genre, sanjo, appears to have arisen through a similar process of interaction between classes. The late Chosŏn literati enjoyed gathering in private entertainment clubs called p’ungnyubang (Kim Hee-sun 2008b: 35). P’ungnyu, literally translatable as “wind and stream” (Park Chan E. 20...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Music Examples
• CD Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Hwang Byungki as Traditional Musician: Kayagŭm Sanjo
• 2 Finding a Voice: Hwang Byungki’s Compositions of the 1960s
• 3 Buddhism, Taoism, and the Meditative Aesthetic
• 4 Broadening Horizons: Diversity of Sound and Unity of Approach in Hwang Byungki’s Compositions
• 5 North Korea, Before and After: New Developments in Hwang Byungki’s Music Since the 1980s
• Conclusion: Hwang Byungki in the Twenty-First Century
• Appendices
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Discography
• Index