Ethno Musicology

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University of Illinois Press and Society for Ethnomusicology are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Ethnomusicology. http://www.jstor.org Road Test for a New Model: Korean Musical Narrative and Theater in Comparative Context Author(s): Andrew Killick Source: Ethnomusicology, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Spring - Summer, 2003), pp. 180-204 Published by: on behalf of University of Illinois Press Society for Ethnomusicology Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3113917 Accessed: 11-02-2016 11:04 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. This content downloaded from 149.171.67.164 on Thu, 11 Feb 2016 11:04:44 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Ethnomusicology by University of Illinois Press.

Transcript of Ethno Musicology

Page 1: Ethno Musicology

University of Illinois Press and Society for Ethnomusicology are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Ethnomusicology.

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Road Test for a New Model: Korean Musical Narrative and Theater in Comparative Context Author(s): Andrew Killick Source: Ethnomusicology, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Spring - Summer, 2003), pp. 180-204Published by: on behalf of University of Illinois Press Society for EthnomusicologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3113917Accessed: 11-02-2016 11:04 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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SPRING/SUMMER 2003

Road Test for a New Model: Korean Musical Narrative and Theater in Comparative Context

ANDREW KILLICK / University of Sheffield

t is now fifteen years since Timothy Rice first proposed a "remodeling of

ethnomusicology" (Rice 1987). Even today, to speak of "remodeling" might seem premature, implying as it does the existence of a substantial structure to be altered and made more conveniently habitable. If ethnomusicology has ever possessed such an edifice, it is a house with many mansions, and we have long since lost the blueprints. The rambling floorplan of the field be-

speaks a haphazard succession of previous "remodelings," and more than one

ethnomusicologist has wondered whether the entire building ought to be condemned and razed to the ground (Lieberman 1977; Kingsbury 1997).

Rice, on the other hand, now proposes what might be seen as yet an- other "remodeling" of ethnomusicology, and I am glad to have this opportu- nity to comment on it, because it seems to me that what he said in his 1987 article "Toward the Remodeling of Ethnomusicology" is, if anything, more true today than it was then: "Too many of the reports on what we have 'seen, heard, and discovered' are written as if ethnomusicology did not exist, as if there were no general ideas to be advanced, no general questions to be asked" (Rice 1987:516). Our field as a whole has become ever more wary of totaliz-

ing schemes, and no doubt for good reasons: we have sought to distance ourselves from the evolutionist agenda of the old comparative musicology and to celebrate uniqueness and diversity both in the cultures we study and in the methodologies we bring to that study. And yet, it becomes ever harder to justify dispensing with global models and a global scope of inquiry if we are to deal responsibly with a musical world that is increasingly driven by global forces.

While acknowledging that the questions he raises could lead toward

global analysis of a "modem world system," Rice has chosen to steer them

? 2003 by the Society for Ethnomusicology

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VOL. 47, No. 2 ETHNOMUSICOLOGY

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in the opposite direction, toward the production of "subject-centered eth-

nographies" focused on individual and small-group musical experience. Yet it seems to me that such ethnographies, unless informed by a global perspec- tive, may be hard to distinguish from what Rice earlier called "the detailed, independent and insular studies that seem to proliferate in the ethno- musicological literature at present" (1987:480), and that if our sole objective is to continue producing these narrowly focused studies, we perhaps have little need of models such as his. A model is useful in proportion to its appli- cability to different cases, its ability to identify recurrent patterns and to sug- gest explanations for them. Hence, in his earlier "remodeling" project, Rice stated unequivocally: "The model . . leads us to a comparative stance with respect to music. If we can keep before us an image of fundamental forma- tive processes that operate in many cultures, this should lead us to create microstudies that can be compared to other microstudies" (1987:480).

Some have consciously attempted to produce such microstudies, but few have ventured actual comparisons between them. In the same year that Rice published his original "remodeling" article, Anthony Seeger published his book Why Suya Sing, explaining in the preface that while his study avoids comparative generalizations, it offers the type of carefully presented, socially contextualized example that Steven Feld recommends as a basis for compari- sons (Seeger 1987:xv). Here Seeger refers to Feld's article "Sound Structure as Social Structure," which suggests that "The meaningful comparisons are going to be the ones between the most radically contextualized case ex- amples" (Feld 1984:385). But if such comparisons ever get made, it is gener- ally in the context of teaching rather than research, and we should probably be asking ourselves why the one aspect of our work has become so unrep- resentative of the other. Those of us who have not rejected the idea of com- parison in principle seem to be always inviting each other to make compari- sons and preparing to do it ourselves some day, but never actually getting around to it. In 1992, Mark Slobin boldly published an article entitled "Micro- musics of the West: A Comparative Approach," but in revising that article for publication as a book the following year, he seemed to think better of it, choosing a title (Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West) that did not refer to comparison, though still aiming to offer "frameworks, guidelines, categories that are general enough to imply the emergence of afuture com- parative method" (Slobin 1993:6; emphasis added). In similar ways, many of us in ethnomusicology seem to be praying for comparison as Saint August- ine prayed for chastity: O Lord, give us comparison, but not just yet.1

In the present paper, I propose to end this procrastination and apply Rice's new model to a study that is unabashedly comparative. I begin by tak- ing the new model for a test drive through my own primary research area, the musical narrative and theatrical traditions of Korea. Though I do not at-

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tempt a "subject-centered musical ethnography" in quite the way that Rice advocates, I try to include the perspectives of individual subjects in relation to the broader processes of genre formation and social history. This "road test," I hope, reveals the usefulness of Rice's three "dimensions"-time, place, and metaphor-as a conceptual framework for charting a course of histori- cal development and changing meanings within a culture. The resulting miniature ethnography may not be radically different from those which many ethnomusicologists have been producing for some time, since, as Rice him- self points out, his model does not so much raise new questions or explana- tory methods as it codifies an existing practice that others have arrived at from different directions. If it does encourage a new avenue of inquiry, it is

perhaps in the realm of "metaphor," Rice's term for the varied and sometimes conflicting beliefs that people hold about the nature of music, and I will

emphasize this dimension in my application of the model, though, as I will

subsequently explain, I have reservations about calling it "metaphor." In the latter part of the paper, I will argue that the full utility of a model

such as Rice's cannot be realized until we go beyond the writing of compa- rable microstudies and make some actual comparisons through which gen- eral questions are addressed. As an example of this comparative approach, I show how the development of musical theater in twentieth-century Korea has been in many ways parallel to, though apparently uninfluenced by, simi- lar developments elsewhere in Asia and perhaps the world-developments that could be charted in similar ways within Rice's three-dimensional model. Thus, I suggest that the greatest value of the model lies in its capacity for

framing inductive generalizations and hypotheses as to which routes through the three-dimensional space tend to be more traveled than others, and why. That is, I suggest that Rice's new model, like his earlier "remodeling," can

help us achieve more ambitious goals than the description of single cultures or practices, and to that end, should also lead us to a comparative stance.

Case Study: Musical Narrative and Theater in Korea

In this section, I will use Rice's new model to steer a course through the

history of three related musical narrative and theatrical genres from Korea: the solo story-singing tradition of p'ansori, an operatic form with p'ansori- style singing called ch'angguk, and an all-female variant of ch'anggik known as y6osng kukkuk. This immediately poses a conceptual problem in that "music," as that term is usually understood in the West, forms only a part of each genre, alongside verbal and visual elements. Should Rice's model be

applied only to the strictly "musical" component? Should the other compo- nents be subjected to separate analyses in which the "metaphor" dimension refers to beliefs about the nature of language or the nature of the stage?

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While it may sometimes be true that the music of these genres is gov- erned by different metaphors or operates in different spatial or temporal zones than the other components, a separate treatment of each component would seem counterproductive as well as cumbersome, since the model seeks to understand musical experience in all its complex interconnections and not in isolation. Moreover, since music rarely exists in isolation from other aesthetic elements (words, dance, record sleeves, music videos ... ), the model will have to encompass composite art forms like song and opera if it is to have any efficacy outside the narrow world of instrumental concert performance. (Even some of Rice's examples involve sung words and visual presentation.) Thus, I feel justified in treating each of my Korean narrative and theatrical genres as a totality and slotting it into the position of "music" in Rice's model, even though they involve more than what might be usually thought of as "music." At the same time, the analysis must be prepared to recognize the relative autonomy of music, words, and visuals, and the dif- ferent and even conflicting roles that they may play within a theatrical event.

The formative years of p'ansori, ch'angguik, and y6osng kukkuk coincide respectively with the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods in Korea's history, and although all three continue to be performed today, my discussion of each genre will center on its formation process during one of these periods, showing how its development through "time" was accompa- nied by patterned and sometimes contradictory movements along the "place" and "metaphor" axes. These movements are summarized, admittedly in rather simplistic terms, in Table 1.

In p'ansori, a story selected from a handful of well-known tales is deliv- ered either in its entirety (which can take several hours) or, more commonly, in excerpted episodes. The stories often tell of severe tribulations, but they invariably end happily in a manner that "rewards virtue and reproves vice" (kw6ns6n chingak in the proverbial Sino-Korean phrase). Most of them in-

Table 1. The "spaces" of three Korean musical/narrative genres.

time place dominant metaphor: genre (of formation) (of dissemination) music as ...

p'ansori precolonial regional (southwest) prayer, entertainment [musical storytelling] (before 1905) subcultural (peasant) later art, teaching

later national, all classes

ch'angguk colonial local (Seoul) commodity [opera with (1905-45) later national social behavior/text

p'ansori-style singing] then regional (provinces) entertainment then national again expression of identity

y6song kukkuik postcolonial national expression of identity [all-female ch'angguk] (since 1945) later diasporic/global pulgasari monster

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volve animal or supernatural characters as well as human ones, and they tend to imply both an orthodox moral theme (such as devotion to one's parents or faithfulness in marriage) and a subversive satire on authority figures (in the person of a foolish king or a corrupt magistrate). Their literary style, simi- larly, combines the earthy rural dialect of the southwestern Ch6lla Province where p'ansori originated, with erudite poetic allusions borrowed from the upper-class patrons who later supported it.

These stories are conveyed through a mixture of speech, song, and ges- ture, to the accompaniment of a small barrel-shaped drum, the puk. The drummer models audience involvement by giving rhythmic cries of appre- ciation called ch'uimsae, and is occasionally addressed by the singer as if he were one of the characters in a scene, though he (drummers are invariably male) does not respond in that role. His main function is to outline the rhyth- mic cycles (changdan) around which the music of p'ansori is organized, most of them based on compound meters with triple subdivision of the main beats.

P'ansori singing is noted for its emotional intensity, projected through performance techniques that include a broad palette of vocal timbres with emphasis on the hoarse and husky part of the spectrum; a wide vocal range extended upwards by falsetto; heavy vibrato and portamenti; and the use of physical gestures and mimetic movements. The sung melodies conform both to rhythmic cycles and to melodic modes (cho), of which the most common is kyemyonjo, whose three structural pitches correspond roughly to the notes of a minor triad. This minimalistic tonal material proves surprisingly versa- tile in combination with contrasting rhythmic cycles, and further variety is provided by the use of different melodic modes derived from the folk music of other regions or from the elite tradition, most of these being versions of the anhemitonic pentatonic scale.2

When the first written references to p'ansori appeared in the mid- eighteenth century, the "place" of the genre's diffusion was both "regional" and "subcultural," for the tradition was specific to Ch6lla Province and to the peasant class. During the nineteenth century, however, the audience for p'ansori gradually expanded to the point where it transcended virtually all geographical and social boundaries within Korea and moved p'ansori along the "place" axis to what Rice would call the "national" level. (This should not, however, be taken to imply a modem sense of the nation and national- ism, which had not yet developed in Korea.) By the 1860s, generous elite and royal patronage was attracting p'ansori singers away from Ch6lla Prov- ince to the capital, Seoul.3 This upward social mobility had important con- sequences for p'ansori, since Korea's ruling class based its claim to legitimacy on moral virtue cultivated by studying the loftiest literature of Sinocentric civilization, and could not with impunity be seen to enjoy the sometimes bawdy and subversive texts of p'ansori. To meet their needs, the stories were

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dressed up with a veneer of Confucian ethical themes and with elegant ex-

pressions from Chinese and Sino-Korean poetry, as well as musical resources derived from the elite traditions.

P'ansori's movement along the "place" axis, from "regional" and "sub- cultural" to "national," appears to have helped produce a movement along the "metaphor" axis as well. Among the peasant class, p'ansori played a role in the indigenous religion, a form of shamanism, through a metaphor of "music as prayer," though when it was performed in the village square by itinerant players who also offered tumbling, tightrope-walking, and comical

dialogues, it seems likely that "entertainment" was the dominant metaphor.4 When p'ansori was brought to the capital and to an elite audience, mere "entertainment" could not be openly embraced as an end in itself, and

p'ansori had to acquire the aesthetic and ethical qualities that this new audi- ence would associate with the metaphor of "music as art." Like all art of the Confucian ruling class, it had to justify itself not only by elegance and refinement but by some ostensibly didactic or character-molding capacity, which we might designate by a new metaphor, "music as teaching."

Naturally, these metaphors did not necessarily supplant or exclude each other, and several metaphors might be operative within the same situation, though only one or two would probably be foregrounded in the mind and musical experience of any given subject. For instance, almost all musical

activity is (among other things) a form of "social behavior," and this meta-

phor must have come to the surface at times for audiences and exponents of p'ansori wherever it was performed. That is, forms of patronage and per- former-audience interaction must have been recognized as enacting social relations. Professional entertainers were lower in status even than peasants, and the distance at which they were kept by "respectable" patrons is sug- gested by a comment, evidently referring to a p'ansori performance, that was made by British traveler Isabella Bird Bishop at the end of the nineteenth

century: "If a wife is very dull indeed, she can, with her husband's permis- sion, send for actors, or rather posturing reciters, to the compound, and look at them through the chinks of the bamboo blinds" (Bishop [1898] 1970:119).

Nothing could be more different from the Western concert or theater

setting with its goal of maximum visibility and audibility of the performers; but Korea had no indoor theaters before the twentieth century, probably because it lacked the substantial merchant class that supported professional theater in neighboring China and Japan, as indeed in the West. This would start to change around the turn of the century, when social and economic reforms came to many areas of Korean life through commercial and mission-

ary activity and through the growing Japanese political influence that would lead to the establishment of a Protectorate in 1905 and to Annexation in 1910.5 One result of these reforms was that Seoul began to develop the kind

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of audience and financial backing that would make commercial theater vi- able, while the indoor theater, as a novelty, seemed an appropriate symbol for the modem and progressive nation that Korea now aspired to become. Thus, when celebrations were planned for the fortieth anniversary of King Kojong's accession in 1902, a theater was constructed under royal auspices, modeled on European rather than traditional Chinese or Japanese designs. For various reasons, the jubilee was postponed for several years, but the theater was operated commercially, and it was from performances by p'ansori singers at this and other newly opened theaters that a new form of musical drama, ch'angguk, began to emerge.6

This development appears to have taken place at the instigation of a man named Yi Injik, a writer and politician who believed (with many Western observers) that the decayed and corrupt social order of Korea could be rem- edied only underJapanese tutelage. While studying inJapan, Yi Injik had been

exposed to the newJapanese interpretation of Western melodrama, shinpa geki or "new-school drama," which had developed out of the dissident po- litical dramas (s6shigeki) of the late nineteenth century.7 This may have led him to see Korea's new theater as a means of disseminating his own politi- cal message. He must have realized, too, that the only available performers with relevant skills in declamation and dramatic projection were the p'ansori singers, and that these popular performers could be counted on to draw a crowd. He was very familiar with p'ansori, having earlier translated one of the stories into Japanese, and thus was able to write a story using the p'ansori literary style so that it could be performed with p'ansori-style singing. The result was "Silver World" (Unsegye), published and performed in 1908.

"Silver World" presents an interesting test case for the flexible applica- tion of Rice's model, particularly in the realm of "metaphor." For one thing, the music and the narrative content of the production appear to have been

governed by different metaphors. In using p'ansori singing as a crowd-puller, Yi Injik was applying a metaphor of "music as entertainment" or (since there was a fixed admission charge) "music as commodity." But in using the stage as a vehicle of propaganda, he was perhaps extending the didactic or "teach-

ing" metaphor that p'ansori had acquired through its embrace by the Con- fucian ruling class.

Moreover, the production as a whole reveals some of the complexity that must frequently arise from the all-inclusive "social behavior" metaphor. "Sil- ver World" aimed to expose the corruption and stagnation of Korea's old social order through the story of a provincial governor extorting wealth from an innocent commoner. The inherent injustice of the system is conveyed in a narrative passage written in the manner of aniri, the stylized spoken por- tions of p'ansori:

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Although people posted anonymous letters of complaint outside his gate several times a month, the Governor ignored them and attended only to his own busi- ness. What kind of business was this? The business of scraping up and passing on. What did he scrape up and to whom did he pass it on? He scraped up the wealth that the people lived on all over Kangw6n Province and passed it on to his superiors in Seoul... Serving his superiors was both hard and easy. What was the hard part? If he just worked for the people as an honest official and didn't bribe his superiors, within a few days he would lose his stamp of authority and have to give up his job ... What was the easy part? All he had to do was soak up the life blood of the people before somebody else did .... (Yi Injik [1908] 1995:272-74)

What complicates the situation is that this old social order was represented in a performance context that belonged to a new set of social relations. P'ansori singers had long depended on the generosity either of the villagers who gathered at their unrestricted open-air performances or of the wealthy patrons who summoned them to their homes, but the audience for "Silver World" was neither of these. Spectators had paid a fixed price for admission to an indoor space that was open to all those, and only those, who would pay that price. They had bought their entertainment in a free market. A metaphor of "music as commodity" had come into play, and this was part of the general move toward a market economy that accompanied Korea's en- try into the "modem" world-a world which, for Korea, was first and fore- most a colonial world. Yi Injik's advocacy of this new world, through his use of the commercial theater, complements his satire of the old, the "silver" or grey-haired world of precolonial Korea.

The metaphor of "music as commodity" is perhaps intelligible only through a broader metaphor of "music as social behavior" which enables us to identify a producer-consumer relationship between performer and audi- ence. And this metaphor of "music as social behavior" will frequently have to accommodate cases like "Silver World" in which the performance enacts one social relation while depicting another. Such a situation is not uncom- mon where music is associated with verbal or other representational con- tent: what Susan Seizer has called the "narrating event" may be governed by different metaphors than the "narrated event" (Seizer 1997:69). One need only think of a Western opera set in ancient Greece, or a commercial record- ing of a folk ballad.

This kind of disparity is practically a given in ch'angguk, which is nearly always set in a historical period before Korea had commercial theaters. The ever-popular "Story of Ch'unhyang," for instance, routinely includes a scene of a traditional farmers' band and villagers dancing together in a much more communal, participatory, and non-commercial context than the theater in which the scene is presented. Another way to interpret such a case might

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be to say that a metaphor of "music as social behavior" operates at the level of performer-audience interaction, while the diegesis, the representational content, is a special instance of "music as symbol or text" in which what is symbolized or textualized is itself a form of social behavior and relation. Perhaps the social behavior depicted by such a text often serves, like the exuberant amateur singing and dancing in so many commercial Hollywood musicals, to mask or deny the passive consumerism of audiences presented with "music as commodity."8 This may be one reason for the profusion of diegetic music in many forms of musical theater and film.

The commodity value of early ch'angguk proved unable to compete with more thoroughly moder entertainments that arrived soon afterwards, such as spoken melodramas in Korean and imported silent movies. Ch'anggik activity gradually dwindled in Seoul, though it hung on longer in the more conservative provinces. In the 1930s came a revival associated with a new metaphor applied at the "national" level to uniquely Korean performing arts such as p'ansori and ch'anggfik: the metaphor of "music as expression of identity."9 This may appear to be an example of the "music as symbol or text" metaphor, but in the rhetoric of Korean cultural nationalism, music is not described as a "symbol" that merely refers to or stands for the idea of na- tional identity; rather, it is represented as an actual product or manifesta- tion of that identity, an outpouring of a Korean national essence envisaged as very concrete and tangible. A 1931 newspaper article, for instance, reads: "Our Korea, which had its own culture from ancient times, also had its own way of singing. The joy expressed in that singing was our joy, and the sad- ness expressed in that singing was our sadness; this was the mouthpiece of our lives" (Tonga Ilbo, 29 March 1931; quoted in Paek Hy6nmi 1997:209 n.42). The increasing recognition of p'ansori as just such an expression of identity, worthy of preservation and development, led to a revival of ch'anggiik in Seoul that quickly made the genre a "national" phenomenon once more.

Spearheaded by a group called the Korean Vocal Music Association (Choson Songak Yon'guboe), this new incarnation of ch'angguik introduced many of the features by which the genre is recognized today, including the current name ch'angguk ("singing drama"). Complete dramas were per- formed without other acts, as opposed to single scenes in a "variety show" format, and the scale of production was gradually expanded. Libretti were fleshed out with new spoken dialogue, and visual presentation became much more elaborate, encompassing colorful costumes, dance troupes, stage scen- ery, modem lighting, and even film projection. The repertoire ranged far beyond the core of traditional p'ansori stories to include dramatizations of novels and legends of Korea's remote past. Musically, the barrel drum accom-

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paniment of p'ansori was supplemented by a growing orchestra of melodic instruments such as the transverse flute taegam, the double-reed pipep'iri, and the two-string fiddle haegum.

This raised the question of how the singing in ch'angguik should be ac- companied by instruments of definite pitch, since Korea had no traditional system of harmony, and the p'ansori melodies were too long and complex to be memorized by the instrumentalists for unison or heterophonic perfor- mance, as had been done in kayagum py6ngch'ang (p'ansori-style singing self-accompanied on the twelve-string plucked zither kayagum). The solu- tion was a texture somewhat similar to the improvised polyphony of Korea's shamanistic sinawi ensembles, in which each player listened closely to the others and aimed to fill in the "gaps" in the other lines.10 In ch'angguk ac- companiment, the focus of the player's attention was not the other instru- mental parts but the vocal line, which was to be "shadowed" rather in the manner of an Indian violin or scrangi accompanist, except that the multiple "shadows" created a spontaneous and unpredictable polyphony of their own. This type of accompaniment became known as sus6ng karak or "melodies following the voice," and it alternated with unison performance for simpler tunes such as interpolated folk songs, as remains common in ch'anggdk today.

With the addition of melodic instruments, ch'anggdk came to sound less like p'ansori, and another factor contributing to this differentiation was the casting of lead roles on the basis of glamor rather than mastery of p'ansori singing. Increasingly, veteran p'ansori singers played the older characters or provided "effect music" from behind the scenes, while the romantic leads were portrayed by young actors less rigorously trained in p'ansori whose singing came to be labeled by the derogatory termyon'guk sori ("play sing- ing"). Thus, the theatricalization of ch'angguk has taken the blame for a de- cline of standards in p'ansori singing, reminding us that the visual and musi- cal components of a theatrical genre can at times be more in tension than in harmony with each other. Since one of the goals of the Korean Vocal Music Association was to educate audiences in the appreciation of p'ansori, and they used glamorous young actors to attract those audiences, we might say that the group had reversed the strategy of Yi Injik in "Silver World" and applied divergent metaphors of "theater as entertainment" and "music as teaching (or art)."

While both the first wave of ch'anggiik and this new revival began in Seoul and moved along the "place" axis from "local" to "national," ch'anggdk has never lost the association with Ch6lla Province and the peasant class which it inherited from p'ansori. This "regional" and "subcultural" connota- tion was brought home to me at one recent performance in Seoul, when a woman sitting near me in the audience, amused by the regional and lower-

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class dialect of the maid Hyangdan, audibly mimicked some of her lines. Here, complexity rears its head on the "place" axis as well as that of "metaphor": ch'angguik has gone from local to national distribution without losing its regional and subcultural associations. But after liberation from Japanese co- lonialism in 1945, it was understandably the "national" level that was empha- sized: in Korea's postcolonial process of nation-building, ch'angguk was readily identified as an "expression of national identity" and even came to be known as kukkuk or "national drama."

A new form of ch'angguk was developing around the same time; but before introducing it, we must retrace our steps and review the history of p'ansori and ch'angguk with regard to gender. Though historically linked with the narrative songs of shamans who were predominantly female, p'ansori took shape as a genre performed exclusively by men. (Rice would perhaps say that, so far as performers were concerned, it operated at a "sub- cultural" level of the "place" dimension defined by male gender.) The first women to be trained in it belonged to the profession of female entertainers known as kisaeng, in some ways equivalent to Japan's geisha. Kisaeng were skilled in the "refined" arts appreciated by their upper-class patrons, such as

sijo art song and court dance, and they began to learn p'ansori when the genre attracted elite patronage in the later nineteenth century. While the advent of female p'ansori singers has sometimes been represented as a nec- essary condition for the emergence of ch'anggiik (e.g., Pihl 1994:42), it has never been established that women took part in the earliest ch'anggiik pro- ductions, and to me it seems more likely that men played the female roles, as they did in traditional East Asian theater and even in some shinpa produc- tions. As late as the 1910s, when there were sufficient female p'ansori sing- ers for a fully gender-integrated ch'angguk, most performances were given by separate all-male or all-female casts, perhaps because of a lingering sense of the impropriety of men and women appearing on stage together (Paek Hy6nmi 1997:102-16). Thus, it was probably not until the 1930s revival that ch'angguk was regularly performed without cross-gender casting.

By that time, p'ansori had become a popular item in the repertoire of the kisaeng, and female singers had come to outnumber male, as indeed they still do. (As a result, women play many of the minor and comic male roles in ch'angguk today.) Meanwhile, the Korean theater world had taken note of Japan's highly successful all-female musical theater phenomenon, Takarazuka. It was perhaps inevitable that all-female troupes would appear in Korea too, and when they did, in the late 1940s, they rapidly achieved a mass popular- ity that would eclipse that of mixed-cast ch'anggfik throughout Korea over the next two decades.1'

From the beginning, this all-female variant of ch'angguk adopted the genre's postcolonial name, kukkiik, and to this day it is generally known as

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yosong kukkiik or "women's national drama." Initially, y6s6ng kukkik was

perhaps not readily distinguishable from the mixed-cast ch'anggik of its day except by its all-female cast. Essentially the same repertoire of p'ansori sto- ries and legendary tales was presented with a similar blend of visual appeal and "light" p'ansori singing. As y6s6ng kukkuk became more popular, it appears to have leant toward the sentimental and sensational, and severed any remaining links with the didactic "revival" ethos of the Korean Vocal Music Association. Y6s6ng kukkik has not been ashamed to embrace the modem and cosmopolitan alongside the national, and in today's productions it is not unusual to hear traditional voices and instruments accompanied by synthesizers. After a period of decline, the genre has made something of a comeback since the mid-1980s, featuring many of the original stars now in their sixties and seventies. In this form, "women's national drama" has achieved a presence not only at the national level, but at the "diasporic" and "global" levels too, for it is regularly performed overseas, primarily, though not exclusively, in places with a substantial Korean population.

But in the scramble to establish the postcolonial Korean society as a patriarchal one, "women's national drama" seemed to some a contradiction in terms, or at least a threat to the assumption that whatever operates at the "national" level ought to be defined and controlled by men. This point of view is expressed by Pak Hwang, author of the first published history of ch'anggik, who quotes the proverb, "When the hen crows, the house is ruined" (amt'algi ulmyon ku chibi manghanda), and compares the all-female troupes with the mythical creatures called pulgasari that were said to eat iron and to have tried to overthrow the medieval kingdom of Kory6 (Pak Hwang 1976:229). (Pulgasari is also the title of a 2001 horror movie along the lines of Godzilla.) To Pak, y6s6ng kukkuik's implied invocation of the metaphor "music as expression of (national) identity" represents a threat to the nation itself, and he contests it by substituting a metaphor of his own, one that I can only encapsulate in the phrase, "music as monster." Contesta- tion over music perhaps often takes this form of applying different metaphors to the same music.

The creation of a National Ch'angguik Company in 1962 has helped mixed-cast ch'anggiik to hold its own against the "monster" of the female troupes, and solo p'ansori too continues to thrive, though all three genres seem to vacillate between metaphors at times.12 The metaphors of music as "art," "teaching," and "expression of identity" are sometimes in tension with the "entertainment" and "commodity" metaphors when it comes to attract- ing today's Korean audiences to performances based on tradition. But it seems likely that, following Korea's "globalization" drive of the late 1990s, all three genres will continue to edge toward the "global" end of the "location" axis. Much could be said about the National Ch'anggiik Company's metaphorical

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maneuvers in its drive to win recognition for ch'angguk as "traditional Ko- rean opera," a process I have examined elsewhere (Killick 2001:33-48), but

my present concern is only with the formation processes of p'ansori, ch'angguk, and y6s6ng kukkuk as a route for my "road test."

After this whistlestop tour through the space of musical experience in three Korean genres, we are in a position to consider how well our vehicle has served us. We have found, as I am sure its designer would have predicted, that this new model does not provide a set of pigeon holes in which we can

place and categorize musical experiences unproblematically. The "time" dimension is perhaps the only one that is truly rectilinear, and as Rice indi- cates with his distinction between chronological and experiential views of

time, even this dimension has been made to carry more than mere duration. In addition to the elapse of chronometric intervals that Johannes Fabian has called "Physical Time," the axis must be calibrated by the "grand-scale periodizing" of "Mundane Time" and the "socioculturally meaningful events" of "Typological Time" (Fabian 1983:21-25). The "place" dimension, at first

glance, appears to rise through progressively larger units, but we have seen that music can operate at several of these levels simultaneously, and the all-

important "subcultural" level is not like the others in that it is defined by criteria other than magnitude and physical distribution, and does not form one of a series of nested locales in the way that the other levels on the axis more or less do.

"Metaphor," in my view, is both the most productive and the most prob- lematic of the three dimensions. Strictly speaking, it is not a dimension at

all, in that metaphors can proliferate indefinitely and in no particular order. In describing the complexities of an actual case, I have found myself obliged to add several metaphors not provided by the original model, and to treat

"metaphor" as a matter, not just of people's fundamental beliefs about mu- sic in general, but of their attitudes toward particular kinds of music in par- ticular times and places. No doubt Rice intended the concept to be used in this way as well, and one of the strengths of his model is that it is designed to accommodate just this kind of customization. My road test seems to sup- port his claim that contestation over music can be fruitfully investigated by examining the conflicting positions of individuals within the space of musi- cal experience, and particularly the different metaphors that they apply to the same music.

Many of the things that fall under the heading of "metaphor" (music as

entertainment, teaching, expression of identity, etc.) will be familiar from older discourses on "function" and "music as social behavior," and here we should perhaps reiterate the point that the model is intended to integrate existing lines of inquiry into a unified and comprehensive system rather than raise fundamentally new questions. It should not be surprising that "meta-

phor" overlaps with "function," since beliefs about what something is must

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invariably be bound up with what it does. That "social behavior" is an ever-

present aspect of music does not mean that it is always the uppermost as-

pect in the minds of those involved. Calling attention to the range of alter- native metaphors that might be invoked is, I think, a helpful way of looking at the complexities of musical experience.

To me, a more serious problem concerns the use of the word "metaphor" itself. The problem is not so much that the word gives a misleading impres- sion at first sight: after all, any writer is entitled to define a term and use it according to that definition, and it is the reader's duty to keep the writer's definition in mind and ignore any irrelevant connotations. The problem is more that a notion of "metaphor," if it is to be useful in describing a particu- lar form of human thought, must depend on a contrast with other possible forms of thought, for instance the "literal," conceived as something more than

simply old and stale metaphors. If all thought is metaphorical, the term loses its value as a way of distinguishing the very particular form of thought that I think Rice is referring to, and we might as well go back to Alan Merriam's term "concept" as a catch-all label for the ideational component of a musi- cal culture (Merriam 1964:63-84). This leads me to the conclusion that "meta- phor" may not be the right word for the process we are describing at all.

Rice's view of metaphor is clearly related to that of George Lakoff and MarkJohnson in their much-cited book Metaphors We Live By: "The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one thing in terms of an- other" (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:5). I am not sure that this is what happens when people describe or treat music as a form of art, commodity, medicine, or expression of identity. It is not that these concepts are already formed in our minds, prior to and separate from music, providing readily intelligible "terms" through which the mysterious phenomenon of music can be "un- derstood and experienced" more concretely. If anything, the experience of music is more direct and immediate than our relation to abstractions like "art" or "commodity" can ever be.

These abstractions, it seems to me, serve not as metaphors but as cat- egories that may be considered to contain music, and to be partly defined by it, in a quite literal sense. When Thomas Turino, for instance, insists that, "At the pragmatic level, musical behavior is social behavior" (1989:2; empha- sis in original), his point is that what many ethnomusicologists have regarded as a metaphorical equivalence is in fact a literal and categorical one. He speaks of "social behavior," not as a metaphor for "musical behavior" (nor vice versa), but as a category that contains it: musical behavior is one kind of social behavior, and social behavior partly consists of musical behavior. The Navajo view of music as medicine is equally literal and shows the same structure of thought: only the category is different. While categorization, like other forms of thought, might be influenced by what Lakoff and Johnson call "concep- tual metaphors," the categories themselves are not metaphors.

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Lakoff and Johnson evidently recognize this distinction, for in the sec- tion of their book that deals with categorization (1980:162-66), they do not use the word "metaphor" even once. Instead, they describe categorization in the following terms:

A categorization is a natural way of identifying a kind of object or experience by highlighting certain properties, downplaying others, and hiding still others. ... To highlight certain properties is necessarily to downplay or hide others,

which is what happens whenever we categorize something. Focusing on one set of properties shifts our attention away from others. (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:163; emphasis in original)

This strikes me as a very good description of what happens with the "beliefs about the nature of music" that Rice characterizes as "metaphors." The be- lief that "music is art" highlights some of music's properties while down-

playing those associated with the idea that "music is a commodity," and vice versa. Music, like other things, can belong to many categories simultaneously, and when different people categorize it differently, they are not necessarily contradicting each other, but emphasizing different aspects of music accord-

ing to their differing agendas. Or, as Lakoff andJohnson put it, "What counts as an instance of a category depends on our purpose in using the category" (1980:164).

I'm not sure what term I would suggest as an alternative to "metaphor" in Rice's scheme. Clearly, "Time, Place, and Categorization" would make an unmemorable title. Perhaps the most precise phrase for what we are talking about would be "ontology of music." For the remainder of this paper, how-

ever, I will continue to use the word "metaphor" so that my analysis may be related to Rice's model as clearly as possible.

Despite the bone I have picked with Rice's terminology, I find that his model provides a useful way of structuring observations on the multiple facets of our contemporary musical world, and of reminding ourselves to keep asking the questions whose answers will be pieces in the great jigsaw puzzle of the Big Picture. But if we stop here, all we will have is one of the pieces, most likely an abstract pattern of shapes and colors that mean little in them- selves. To appreciate what the model has to offer, we will have to look for a few of the adjacent pieces and put them together to see if they form a rec-

ognizable image. This is what I now propose to do with regard to modem

developments in Asian musical theater.

A Bigger Picture: Hybrid-popular Musical Theater in Asia

It was only after completing my dissertation (Killick 1998a) and several

publications (1997, 1998b, 1998c) on ch'anggiik that I heard about an up- coming conference in Europe which was to include a series of panels on the

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theme of "hybrid-popular theatres in Asia." In the call for proposals, the panel convener, Hanne de Bruin, had suggested the term "hybrid-popular theatres" as a name for the novel forms of drama that arose in many parts of South and Southeast Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as a result of "direct and indirect contacts between indigenous expressive genres and Western, melodramatic performance conventions and proscenium stage tech- niques, which were 'imported' into Asia during colonial times."'3 She further noted that "The emergence and rise to popularity of the hybrid-popular the- atres appears to have been stimulated by the demand among local audiences for 'novelty'," and that "For their revenues, the hybrid-popular theatres de- pended on the new convention of ticket sales and on the exploitation of a newly emerging 'performance market'. Their grounding in a commercial base distinguished them from earlier theatres, which depended on community or royal patronage."

The idea of a hybrid-popular theater movement remains a working hy- pothesis, but for the sake of the present discussion, I will provisionally adopt it as a way of showing how Rice's model can be used to draw parallels be- tween analogous musical phenomena in different places. For this purpose, hybrid-popular theater might be concisely defined as commercial theater combining elements of indigenous performing arts with performance spaces and other conventions derived, directly or indirectly, from Western models.

After reading de Bruin's call for proposals, it was immediately clear to me that Korean ch'angguk would be a good example of what she called "hybrid-popular theatre." I also noticed that Northeast Asia had not been mentioned, despite the fact that the conference was held in conjunction with CHIME, the European Foundation for Chinese Music Research. This was no doubt because the region was not colonized by European powers and had its own well-established commercial theater traditions long before Western- style drama came on the scene. But Korea was the exception: it had never developed commercial indoor theater forms like those of China and Japan, and it did undergo colonization, not by a European power, but by a highly Westernized Japan.

As we have seen, it was largely through the increasingJapanese presence in the years preceding Annexation in 1910 that Korea came to develop a form of drama closely matching de Bruin's description of hybrid-popular theater. Though this art form arose without the direct influence of earlier hybrid- popular theater forms from South and Southeast Asia, much less of Western theater itself, it reproduced the defining characteristics of hybrid-popular theater in a separate but parallel development. By attending the conference, I was able to learn that ch'angguk, however unique in its actual sights and sounds, was on a more general level an example of a phenomenon that had appeared independently in many places under similar conditions. And I came

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to feel that in failing to point out this fact, my dissertation had left something important unsaid.

My own learning process could itself be plotted through the three di- mensions of Rice's model, which, after all, is designed to encompass the

ethnographer as well as those he studies. As I moved along the "time" dimen- sion from the "graduate student" to the "junior faculty" phase of my career, the scope of my research moved along the "place" axis from the "national" to the "areal" level, though the fundamental "metaphor" through which I viewed my subject was still perhaps "music as social behavior." Positioning oneself within the space of the model can promote explicitness about one's

agenda as well as a sense of parity between researcher and researched, though I have my doubts as to how clearly one can see a picture while stand- ing inside the frame. It should also be remembered that Rice does not posit ethnographer and subjects as inhabiting the same space, but rather differ- ent spaces with the same structure: each space will be defined by "time," "place," and "metaphor" axes, but the nodes along these axes will be differ- ent. The spaces may differ greatly in scope and freedom of movement, so that the methodological departure from the old model of mobile ethnogra- pher and local subjects should not be exaggerated. Thus, the self-reflexive

project of charting my own trajectory through the Ricean space in relation to those of my subjects is not one that I choose to emphasize, though the model undoubtedly has this potential.

What concerns me more at present is how the parallels between ch'angguk and other forms of hybrid-popular theater show up as well-worn

paths through the three-dimensional space of Rice's model and lend them- selves to lucid description in its terms. At the "precolonial" end of the "time" dimension, most parts of Asia had some form of drama, though except in China andJapan, these dramas were not usually performed in public theaters but in the private courts of the elite or the open communal spaces of the folk, often as part of a religious festival. To generalize wildly, they typically con-

veyed mythical stories of supernatural beings through song, dance, and mime, and everything was (by modem realist standards) stylized and exaggerated. Most traditions were restricted in "place" to relatively small geographical areas, and the predominant metaphor was perhaps "music as ritual."'4 In

many cases, traditions originating with the common people were absorbed

by the elite and gradually made more lavish, elaborate, and literary: Indian folk dramas were Sanskritized just as Korean p'ansori was Confucianized.

The "colonial" era brought Western influences even to those areas that were not themselves colonized by Western powers, and local narrative and dramatic traditions developed into hybrid-popular theater by adopting con- ventions derived from Western theater. A host of social changes, many of them associated with the coming of "modernity," contributed to the emer-

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gence of these new theater forms: the rise of capitalism, urbanization, West- ern education, and the loss of court patronage, to name a few. But in most cases, these changes can be traced to economic, political, and/or cultural imperialism. To disentangle them would take us far beyond the scope of this paper, and for my present purposes I think it acceptable to group them to- gether as changes characteristic of a "colonial" phase in history. With them came fairly consistent changes in theatrical practice: performances came to be given in enclosed spaces, open to anyone who would pay the price of admission; the subject matter was typically more human, and the presenta- tion more naturalistic. The metaphors of "entertainment" and "commodity" came strongly into play, and the "place" of performance tended to expand from local or regional to national or international.

The first Asians to perform theater of this type appear to have been members of the Parsi community in Bombay around 1850. Many Parsis had become wealthy by trading with the British East India Company and were eager to send their children to the recently opened Elphinstone College, where British-style amateur theatricals became fashionable among students. Meanwhile, professional troupes from Europe and North America were tour- ing Asia and providing another source of inspiration for the development of new local theater forms. From student amateur theatricals emerged profes- sional Parsi theater troupes, which enlivened the original spoken dramas with songs and spectacle to appeal to a diverse audience, and to help them cross linguistic barriers, when they began to tour widely in India and abroad in the 1870s.15

By the end of the century, traveling Parsi troupes had performed in Singapore, the Malay Straits, Penang, Burma, and the Netherlands East Indies, and wherever they went, their popularity was such as to inspire the forma- tion of local troupes following their example. In British Malaya, for instance, the hybrid-popular theater genre that later became known as bangsawan first emerged in the 1870s under the name of tiruan wayang Parsi or "imi- tation Parsi theater" (Tan 1989:231). InJava the visiting Parsi troupes inspired not one but several local forms of hybrid-popular theater: the short-lived komedieJawa and wayang cerita of the 1870s and the more intensively com- mercialized and influential komedie Stamboel of the 1890s (Cohen 2001). Within India, they spawned innumerable local derivatives such as the "Spe- cial Drama" (special natakam) and "Boys' Companies" of Tamil Nadu (Seizer 1997:66). The extent of the Parsi troupes' influence has led Matthew Cohen to speak of a "Parsi theatre movement" with offshoots in far-flung regions of South and Southeast Asia (Cohen 2001: title and passim).

But the burgeoning of hybrid-popular theater forms in late nineteenth- century Asia was not simply a response to the Parsi theater. Such forms could arise without the influence of the Parsi theater if the social and political con-

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ditions were propitious, and these conditions were most often brought about by colonization. Two recurrent consequences of colonial rule were the cre- ation of a new merchant class with the leisure and disposable income to support professional theater, and the introduction of theatrical performances by both amateur and professional troupes from the West, which could serve as models for homegrown genres that aspired to be perceived as up-to-date and cosmopolitan. It appears to have been factors such as these, rather than the influence of the Parsi troupes, that led to the transformation ofJavanese wayang wong drama from a royal court entertainment to a commercial art form during the nineteenth century (Cohen 2001:323-25). Under French colonization in Vietnam, drama adopted Western conventions such as spo- ken dialogue without ever having been exposed to the Parsi theater or its derivatives (Gibbs 2000).

Evidently, hybrid-popular theater in Asia is a phenomenon of polygen- esis rather than pure diffusion. Without direct influence, similar conditions in different places led to the repetition of the same pattern: colonization brings economic change of which one symptom is the commercial indoor theater with its ticket sales, proscenium arch, and realist conventions. New forms of theater are inspired by the desire to emulate the colonist and to meet audience demand for novelty. But familiar local elements, frequently musi- cal, are retained to avoid challenging the audience too much. This recurrent pattern would form a well-worn path through Rice's three-dimensional space.

Korean ch'angguk opera conforms to the pattern not only in its relation- ship to colonization, but also in its relationship to decolonization. The clos- est analogy here is perhaps the Malaysian theater form bangsawan. Sooi-Beng Tan has shown that in the early 20th century, bangsawan was touted as up- to-date, modem, and constantly innovating in response to the changing taste of its ethnically diverse audience (Tan 1989:230). By the 1940s, however, bangsawan, like ch'anggiik, had become a vehicle for new dramas based on national legends, in response to a growth in nationalist consciousness (1989:252). "Since the 1970s," says Tan, "the Malaysian government has cre- ated a 'traditional' past for bangsawan. Under state sponsorship, the popu- lar type of theater has been reshaped, Malayized, and institutionalized for new national purposes" (1989:230). This reshaping has involved the elimination of non-Malay stories and musical features in order to "promote an artificial 'tradition' for bangsawan" as an expression of Malaysian national identity (1989:256).

This pattern should be familiar from our overview of the history of ch'angguk. At first touted as siny6n'guk or "new drama," ch'anggfik is now supported by a National Ch'angguik Company that is making a determined bid for the genre's recognition as "traditional Korean opera," while its colo- nial origins have been written out of most accounts of its history (e.g., Pak

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Hwang 1976). The National Ch'anggfik Company was established in the same year, 1962, that legislation was passed to protect and preserve recognized "traditional" genres like p'ansori as "Intangible Cultural Assets" (muhyong munhwajae). The government that took these two simultaneous steps was that of President Park Chung Hee (Pak Ch6nghui), who had seized power in a military coup the previous year. Legitimacy was a pressing concern for Park, not only because of the undemocratic means by which he had come to power, but because during the colonial period, he and his henchmen had been trained in the Japanese Military Academy, served as officers in the Japa- nese Imperial Army, and helped suppress Korean independence fighters in Manchuria. Patronage of traditional (and would-be traditional) arts was one way for Park to erase his past and claim legitimacy for his government by representing it as a staunch supporter and protector of national tradition. While the National Ch'angguk Company has not necessarily been bound to Park's objectives, especially since his assassination in 1979, it does continue to use state funds to promote an art form intended to represent Korea in the world of traditional theater. In ch'angguk as in bangsawan, a postcolonial power elite has embraced a metaphor of "music as expression of identity" at the national level.

It is this kind of regularity that a model like Rice's might help us to see. We need no longer proceed "as if there were no general ideas to be advanced, no general questions to be asked" (Rice 1987:516). The model enables us to frame such "general questions" in the form: "When we observe a certain pattern of movement along two of the dimensions, what tends to be happen- ing on the third?" For instance, the parallel between ch'angguk and bangsawan might lead us to ask, "When a metaphor of 'music as expression of identity' appears in a postcolonial society, does it typically operate at the national level?" Questions like this could guide the gathering of further data for comparison. It might appear that, since movement along the "time" di- mension is uniform and unidirectional, we will be concerned solely with correlations between "place" and "metaphor" as both of these change through time. But remembering that "time" includes historical periodization and socioculturally meaningful events beyond the sphere of music alone (such as colonization and its aftermath), we should realize that "time" brings its own data into the equation as well.

If a traditional ethnography examines a single "point" within Rice's con- ceptual space (the musical culture of a single, bounded place seen at the present time through a single metaphor of what music is), a number of more recent ethnographies stretch this point into a line by considering more than one time (Muller 1999), place (Sugarman 1997), or metaphor (Rice 1994). Rice advocates going even further in fleshing out all three dimensions to produce richly textured "late moder" or "postmodern" ethnographies. I

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would like to suggest that another useful way to think of the three-dimen- sional space he describes might be in terms of "topographies": the undulat- ing, uneven surfaces of individual music cultures, of cultural groups or cat- egories, or of musical culture in general. If we could find a logical way to order metaphors along a single axis (perhaps by identifying pairs of metaphors that tend to segue into each other and placing them adjacent to each other on the axis), we could then plot the axes of time, place, and metaphor onto latitude, longitude, and altitude for a given sociogeographical "area" of any size (Seoul, Korea, Asia, the Korean diaspora, the world). The grid reference for any point within that area (say, the point where the "postcolonial" pe- riod of time intersects the "national" level of place in South Korea) would have a corresponding altitude representing the dominant metaphor at that

particular juncture (say, "music as expression of identity"). A cross-section through the designated area from east to west would produce a "profile" of the different metaphors operating at the same time on different levels of the

"place" dimension; a cross-section from north to south would generate a

profile of historical change in metaphor within a given "place." With due concern for the dangers of reification, these profiles could then provide a

graphic means of comparison with equivalent profiles for other areas. Of course, if we dug below the surface, we might often find that other

metaphors were operating than those which appeared at first sight, that every culture has its underground scene. But we might also find that most journeys through the space we describe proceed across the land surface and take account of its varied contours and natural obstacles. Once we have mapped this topography, we will be in a position to ask why some paths have fol- lowed the ridges and others the valleys, why some individuals have chosen the well-trodden road and others, like Robert Frost, "the one less traveled

by" (Frost 1995:103).

Conclusion

In presenting this new model, Rice has stressed its capacity for shaping ethnographies that capture the complexity of contemporary musical experi- ence in individual subjects, rather than its value as a comparative framework. But I would argue that its potentially global scope makes it an admirable ve- hicle for pursuing the bigger picture as well as the details. Like Rice's earlier

"remodeling," it offers us "an image of fundamental formative processes that

operate in many cultures" (Rice 1987:480), and encourages us to build on each other's work by asking similar questions about different cases.

What the model does not, I think, profess to offer is explanatory power. It does not oppose or despair of explanation, as some postmodernist thought does, but it does not in itself provide a theory that promises to explain any-

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thing. In asking why musical experience moves around this space in the way that it does, or whether certain kinds of movement along one dimension are regularly correlated with movement along another, we will still have to find or make our theories outside the model. In short, what we are offered is a checklist of questions, not an answer.

Nevertheless, if we keep such general questions before us, we stand a better chance of making our work useful to others, not just by making our monographs comparable with theirs, but by incorporating comparative con- siderations into our monographs themselves. Like the people whose musi- cal lives we study, ethnomusicologists are necessarily involved, explicitly or implicitly, in the act of characterizing music and musical phenomena that Rice calls "metaphor" and that I prefer to call "categorization." Everything we study is an example of some larger category, but we don't often inquire deeply enough into the questions that would connect the example with the broader phenomenon: what is it an example of, and in what ways is it a

counter-example? If we leave it to others to raise these questions, we take two risks: that the questions will never be asked, and that our subject will be used as an example of the wrong category. (And the fact that there is more than one "right" category for something does not mean that there are no "wrong" categories.) The specialist in a subject is the person best qualified to place that subject within a wider discourse, and without doing so, the specialist cannot claim to have done justice to the subject. Rice's new model can help us contextualize our research by showing how everyone, includ- ing the ethnographer, inhabits, if not the same space of musical experience, at least a comparable one.

Acknowledgments

My research and writing on p'ansori, ch'anggiik, and y6s6ng kukkik over the past eight years have been supported in part by a Dissertation Research Grant from the Joint Committee on Korean Studies of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies, a Disser- tation Writing Fellowship from the University of Washington, and a First Year Assistant Professor Award from The Florida State University. I am grateful to Timothy Rice for providing the original impetus and organizing the confer- ence panel from which this project grew, and to the editor and anonymous reviewer for their thoughtful and thought-provoking comments.

Notes

1. In Book VIII of The Confessions, Augustine recalled that as an adolescent he had prayed, "Grant me chastity and self-control, but please not yet" (Augustine 1997:198).

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2. The literary, musical, and performative aesthetics of p'ansori are discussed in countless studies. The most accessible source in English is probably Pihl 1994:69-109. Important Korean sources include Cho Tongil and Kim Hunggyu 1978 and the periodical P'ansori Y6n'gu, pub- lished annually since 1989 by the P'ansori Hakhoe.

3. On the historical development of p'ansori, see Pihl 1994:27-40, 57-68. 4. On the connections between p'ansori and shamanism, see Pihl 1994:8-10, 60-63;

Walraven 1994. 5. A useful study of this period in Korea's history is Cumings 1997:86-138. Less scholarly

but more vivid descriptions of the transformation of various aspects of Korean life are found in Yi Kyu-tae 1970.

6. For a detailed account of the origins of ch'angguk, see Killick 2002. The best historical study of ch'angguk in Korean is Paek Hy6nmi 1997.

7. On the "new-school" and "political" dramas of Japan, see Leiter 1997:588-89; Ortolani 1990:233-42.

8. On the Hollywood version of this process, see Feuer 1993:1-22. 9. On the emergence of this metaphor and its connection with the revival of ch'anggiik

in the 1930s, see Killick 1998b. 10. On sinawi music and its improvisatory techniques, see Lee 1981. 11. To date, the only published article in English on Korean all-female opera is Killick 1997.

The most detailed source in Korean is Kim Py6ngch'61 1998. On Takarazuka, see Berlin 1988; Robertson 1998.

12. On the activities of the National Ch'angguk Company, see Killick 2001. 13. From the call for proposals for the conference "Audiences, Patrons and Performers in

the Performing Arts of Asia," hosted by the European Foundation for Chinese Music Research (CHIME) and the International Institute of Asian Studies (IIAS) at Leiden University, the Nether- lands, on 23-27 August 2000. I am indebted to Hae-Kyung Um, then of Leiden University, for telling me about the conference.

14. For an overview of traditional Asian theater forms and their modem derivatives, see Brandon 1993.

15. On the Parsi theater and its influence, see Ali 1917; Cohen 2001; Hansen 1992:79-85, 1999, 2002; Yajnik 1934:90-98.

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