Book Review: Korean Musical Drama: P'ansori and the Making of Tradition in Modernity

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Korean Musical Drama: P'ansori and the Making of Tradition in Modernity . By Haekyung Um . Farnham, Surrey : Ashgate , 2013. 254 pp. $112.46 (cloth).

Book Reviews--Korea

This book is the product of several decades of research on the Korean p'ansori, traditional solo epic story-singing. It is grand in scope and rooted in an impressive knowledge of the genre. For its historical inclusiveness and nuance, and for considerable content that is new in Korean music studies, it is an important addition to the scholarship of p'ansori and Korean music. While some more music-technical sections are intended for specialists, much of the book will be both accessible and useful to scholars and educators in Korean studies, East Asian performance studies, and ethnomusicology.

Korean Musical Drama is roughly divided into synchronic and historical parts. The first is a thorough analysis of p'ansori genre and style, based on the author's late-1980s dissertation research, focused largely on the epic Ch'unhyangga (Ballad of Ch'unhyang). Chapter 1 describes a typical late 1980s performance of p'ansori, chapter 3 introduces musical and literary conventions of the genre, chapter 4 overviews major styles, and chapter 5 looks at learning processes and individual style. There are other published English-language overviews of p'ansori as genre and style,¹⁰but what is unusual here, in addition to Um's thoroughness, is her agility in integrating social and textual analysis with...