Ethno Musicology

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: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for Ethnomusicology
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VOL.47, No. 2
ETHNOMUSICOLOGY
SPRING/SUMMER2003
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 bespeaks 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 another "remodeling" of ethnomusicology, and I am glad to have this opportunity 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 totalizing 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
180
Killick: Road Testfor a New Model
181
in the opposite direction, toward the production of "subject-centered ethnographies" focused on individual and small-groupmusical experience. Yet
it seems to me that such ethnographies, unless informed by a global perspective, may be hard to distinguish from what Rice earlier called "the detailed,
independent and insular studies that seem to proliferate in the ethnomusicological literatureat 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 applicability to different cases, its ability to identify recurrent patterns and to suggest 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 formative 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 carefullypresented, socially
contextualized example that Steven Feld recommends as a basis for comparisons (Seeger 1987:xv). Here Seeger refers to Feld's article "SoundStructure
as Social Structure,"which suggests that "The meaningful comparisons are
going to be the ones between the most radically contextualized case examples" (Feld 1984:385). But if such comparisons ever get made, it is generally 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 unrepresentative of the other. Those of us who have not rejected the idea of comparison in principle seem to be always inviting each other to make comparisons and preparing to do it ourselves some day, but never actually getting
around to it. In 1992, MarkSlobin boldly published an article entitled "Micromusics 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 comparative method" (Slobin 1993:6; emphasis added). In similarways, many of
us in ethnomusicology seem to be praying for comparison as Saint Augustine 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 taking the new model for a test drive through my own primary research area,
the musical narrativeand theatrical traditions of Korea. Though I do not at-
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Ethnomusicology,
Spring/Summer
2003
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 historical development and changing meanings within a culture. The resulting
miniatureethnography may not be radicallydifferentfrom those which many
ethnomusicologists have been producing for some time, since, as Rice himself points out, his model does not so much raise new questions or explanatory 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 comparable microstudies and make some actual comparisons through which general 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, similar developments elsewhere in Asia and perhaps the world-developments
that could be charted in similarways within Rice's three-dimensional model.
Thus, I suggest that the greatest value of the model lies in its capacity for
framinginductive generalizationsand 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 narrativeand theatrical genres from Korea:
the solo story-singing tradition of p'ansori, an operatic form with p'ansoristyle singing called ch'angguk, and an all-femalevariantof 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 components be subjected to separate analyses in which the "metaphor"dimension
refers to beliefs about the nature of language or the nature of the stage?
183
While it may sometimes be true that the music of these genres is governed 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 different and even conflicting roles that they may play within a theatrical event.
The formative years of p'ansori, ch'angguik,and y6osng kukkukcoincide
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 accompanied by patterned and sometimes contradictorymovements along the "place"
and "metaphor"axes. These movements are summarized,admittedlyin rather
simplistic terms, in Table 1.
In p'ansori, a story selected from a handful of well-known tales is delivered either in its entirety (which can take several hours) or, more commonly,
in excerpted episodes. The stories often tell of severe tribulations, but they
invariablyend happily in a manner that "rewardsvirtue and reproves vice"
(kw6ns6n chingak in the proverbial Sino-Koreanphrase). Most of them inTable 1. The "spaces" of three Korean musical/narrative
genres.
genre
time
(of formation)
place
(of dissemination)
dominant metaphor:
music as ...
p'ansori
[musical storytelling]
precolonial
(before 1905)
regional (southwest)
subcultural (peasant)
later national, all classes
prayer, entertainment
later art, teaching
ch'angguk
[opera with
p'ansori-style singing]
colonial
(1905-45)
y6song kukkuik
[all-femalech'angguk]
postcolonial
(since 1945)
local (Seoul)
later national
then regional (provinces)
then national again
national
later diasporic/global
commodity
social behavior/text
entertainment
expression of identity
expression of identity
pulgasari monster
184
Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2003
volve animal or supernaturalcharactersas 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 literarystyle, similarly, combines the earthy ruraldialect 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 gesture, to the accompaniment of a small barrel-shaped drum, the puk. The
drummer models audience involvement by giving rhythmic cries of appreciation 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 rhythmic cycles (changdan) aroundwhich 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 structuralpitches correspond roughly to the notes
of a minor triad. This minimalistic tonal material proves surprisingly versatile 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 mideighteenth century, the "place"of the genre's diffusion was both "regional"
and "subcultural,"for the traditionwas 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 nationalism, which had not yet developed in Korea.) By the 1860s, generous elite
and royal patronage was attracting p'ansori singers away from Ch6lla Province to the capital, Seoul.3 This upward social mobility had important consequences for p'ansori, since Korea'sruling 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
Killick: Road Test for a New Model
185
dressed up with a veneer of Confucian ethical themes and with elegant expressions from Chinese and Sino-Koreanpoetry, as well as musical resources
derived from the elite traditions.
P'ansori's movement along the "place"axis, from "regional"and "subcultural"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 audience 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 metaphor 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 performer-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 suggested by a comment, evidently referringto a p'ansori performance, that was
made by British traveler Isabella Bird Bishop at the end of the nineteenth
century: "Ifa wife is very dull indeed, she can, with her husband's permission, send for actors, or ratherposturing 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 missionary 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
186
of audience and financial backing that would make commercial theater viable, 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 remedied 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 political 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 political 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 application 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 "teaching" metaphor that p'ansori had acquired through its embrace by the Confucian ruling class.
Moreover, the production as a whole reveals some of the complexity that
must frequently arise from the all-inclusive "social behavior" metaphor. "Silver 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 portions of p'ansori:
187
Although people posted anonymous letters of complaint outside his gate several
times a month, the Governor ignored them and attended only to his own business. 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 entry into the "modem" world-a world which, for Korea, was first and foremost a colonial world. Yi Injik'sadvocacy of this new world, through his use
of the commercial theater, complements his satire of the old, the "silver"or
grey-hairedworld 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 audience. And this metaphor of "music as social behavior" will frequently have
to accommodate cases like "SilverWorld"in which the performance enacts
one social relation while depicting another. Such a situation is not uncommon where music is associated with verbal or other representational content: what Susan Seizer has called the "narratingevent" may be governed by
different metaphors than the "narratedevent" (Seizer 1997:69). One need
only think of a Western opera set in ancient Greece, or a commercial recording 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 "Storyof Ch'unhyang,"for instance, routinely includes a scene
of a traditionalfarmers' 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
188
Ethnomusicology,
Spring/Summer
2003
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."8This may be one reason for the profusion of
diegetic music in many forms of musical theater and film.
The commodity value of earlych'angguk proved unable to compete with
more thoroughly moder entertainments that arrivedsoon 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."9This may appear to be an example of the "musicas 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 national identity; rather, it is represented as an actual product or manifestation of that identity, an outpouring of a Korean national essence envisaged
as very concrete and tangible. A 1931 newspaper article, for instance, reads:
"OurKorea, 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 sadness 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'angguikintroduced
many of the features by which the genre is recognized today, including the
current name ch'angguk ("singing drama"). Complete dramas were performed without other acts, as opposed to single scenes in a "varietyshow"
format, and the scale of production was gradually expanded. Librettiwere
fleshed out with new spoken dialogue, and visual presentation became much
more elaborate, encompassing colorful costumes, dance troupes, stage scenery, modem lighting, and even film projection. The repertoire ranged far
beyond the core of traditional p'ansori stories to include dramatizationsof
novels and legends of Korea'sremote past. Musically,the barreldrum accom-
189
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'angguikshould be accompanied 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 performance, as had been done in kayagum py6ngch'ang (p'ansori-style singing
self-accompanied on the twelve-string plucked zither kayagum). The solution was a texture somewhat similarto 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.10In ch'angguk accompaniment, the focus of the player's attention was not the other instrumental parts but the vocal line, which was to be "shadowed" rather in the
manner of an Indianviolin 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 interpolatedfolk songs, as remainscommon in ch'anggdktoday.
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 singing"). Thus, the theatricalization of ch'angguk has taken the blame for a decline of standardsin p'ansori singing, reminding us that the visual and musical 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
Associationwas to educate audiences in the appreciationof p'ansori, and they
used glamorous young actors to attract those audiences, we might say that
the group had reversed the strategy of Yi Injikin "SilverWorld"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"connotation 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-
190
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 colonialism in 1945, it was understandably the "national" level that was emphasized: 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 "subcultural" 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 necessary 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 productions, 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 productions. As late as the 1910s, when there were sufficient female p'ansori singers 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 popularity 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 stories 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 traditionalvoices 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 regularlyperformed overseas, primarily, though
not exclusively, in places with a substantial Korean population.
But in the scramble to establish the postcolonial Korean society as a
patriarchalone, "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 PakHwang, author of the firstpublished 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'simplied 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." Contestation over music perhaps often takes this form of applying differentmetaphors
to the same music.
The creation of a National Ch'angguikCompany 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.12The metaphors of music as
"art,""teaching,"and "expression of identity"are sometimes in tension with
the "entertainment"and "commodity"metaphors when it comes to attracting today's Koreanaudiences to performancesbased 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
192
maneuvers in its drive to win recognition for ch'angguk as "traditional Korean 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 indicates 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 allimportant "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 problematic 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 music in general, but of their attitudes toward particular kinds of music in particular 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 support his claim that contestation over music can be fruitfully investigated by
examining the conflicting positions of individuals within the space of musical 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 "metaphor" overlaps with "function," since beliefs about what something is must
193
invariablybe bound up with what it does. That "social behavior" is an everpresent aspect of music does not mean that it is always the uppermost aspect in the minds of those involved. Calling attention to the range of alternative 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 impression 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 particular 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 particularform 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 musical culture (Merriam1964:63-84). This leads me to the conclusion that "metaphor" 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 Lakoffand
MarkJohnsonin their much-cited book Metaphors WeLive By: "Theessence
of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one thing in terms of another" (Lakoffand 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 "understood and experienced" more concretely. If anything, the experience of
music is more direct and immediate than our relation to abstractionslike "art"
or "commodity"can ever be.
These abstractions, it seems to me, serve not as metaphors but as categories 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,
"Atthe pragmatic level, musical behavior is social behavior"(1989:2; emphasis in original), his point is that what many ethnomusicologists have regarded
as a metaphoricalequivalence is in fact a literaland 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 Lakoffand Johnson call "conceptual metaphors," the categories themselves are not metaphors.
194
Lakoff and Johnson evidently recognize this distinction, for in the section 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 belief that "music is art" highlights some of music's properties while downplaying 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 according 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, however, 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 themselves. 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 recognizable 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 upcoming conference in Europe which was to include a series of panels on the
195
theme of "hybrid-populartheatres in Asia."In the call for proposals, the panel

convener, Hanne de Bruin,had suggested the term "hybrid-populartheatres"
as a name for the novel forms of dramathat 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, melodramaticperformance conventions and proscenium stage techniques, which were 'imported' into Asia during colonial times."'3She further
noted that "Theemergence and rise to popularity of the hybrid-populartheatres appears to have been stimulated by the demand among local audiences
for 'novelty'," and that "Fortheir revenues, the hybrid-populartheatres depended on the new convention of ticket sales and on the exploitation of a
newly emerging 'performancemarket'.Their grounding in a commercial base
distinguished them from earlier theatres, which depended on community or
royal patronage."
The idea of a hybrid-populartheater movement remains a working hypothesis, 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 between analogous musical phenomena in different places. For this purpose,
hybrid-popular theater might be concisely defined as commercial theater
combining elements of indigenous performing artswith 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-populartheatre." 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 Westernstyle 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 largelythrough the increasingJapanese presence
in the years preceding Annexation in 1910 that Koreacame to develop a form
of drama closely matching de Bruin's description of hybrid-populartheater.
Though this art form arose without the direct influence of earlier hybridpopular 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 similarconditions. And I came
196
Etbnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2003
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 dimensions 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"dimension from the "graduatestudent" to the "juniorfaculty"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 standing inside the frame. It should also be remembered that Rice does not posit
ethnographer and subjects as inhabiting the same space, but rather different spaces with the same structure: each space will be defined by "time,"
"place,"and "metaphor"axes, but the nodes along these axes will be different. The spaces may differ greatly in scope and freedom of movement, so
that the methodological departure from the old model of mobile ethnographer 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-populartheater show up as well-worn
paths through the three-dimensional space of Rice's model and lend themselves 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 dramaswere not usuallyperformed 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 conveyed mythical stories of supernaturalbeings 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."'4In
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 Sanskritizedjust 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 narrativeand
dramatic traditions developed into hybrid-populartheater by adopting conventions derived from Western theater. A host of social changes, many of
them associated with the coming of "modernity,"contributed to the emer-
197
gence of these new theater forms: the rise of capitalism, urbanization,Western 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 together 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 presentation 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-styleamateur theatricals became fashionable among students.
Meanwhile, professional troupes from Europe and North America were touring Asia and providing another source of inspiration for the development of
new local theater forms. From student amateur theatricals emerged professional Parsitheater troupes, which enlivened the originalspoken dramaswith
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 abroadin the
1870s.15
By the end of the century, traveling Parsi troupes had performed in

Singapore,the MalayStraits,Penang, Burma,and the Netherlands EastIndies,
and wherever they went, their popularity was such as to inspire the formation of local troupes following their example. In BritishMalaya,for instance,
the hybrid-populartheater genre that later became known as bangsawan
first emerged in the 1870s under the name of tiruan wayang Parsi or "imitation Parsitheater"(Tan 1989:231). InJavathe visiting Parsitroupes 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 commercialized and influential komedie Stamboel of the 1890s (Cohen 2001).
Within India, they spawned innumerable local derivatives such as the "Special Drama"(special natakam) and "Boys'Companies"of TamilNadu (Seizer
1997:66). The extent of the Parsitroupes' influence has led Matthew Cohen
to speak of a "Parsitheatre movement" with offshoots in far-flungregions of
South and Southeast Asia (Cohen 2001: title and passim).
But the burgeoning of hybrid-populartheater forms in late nineteenthcentury Asiawas not simply a response to the Parsitheater. Such forms could
arise without the influence of the Parsitheater if the social and political con-
198
ditions were propitious, and these conditions were most often brought about
by colonization. Two recurrent consequences of colonial rule were the creation of a new merchant class with the leisure and disposable income to
support professional theater, and the introduction of theatricalperformances
by both amateurand 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 Parsitroupes, that led to the transformationofJavanese
wayang wong dramafrom 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 spoken dialogue without ever having been exposed to the Parsi theater or its
derivatives (Gibbs 2000).
Evidently, hybrid-populartheater in Asia is a phenomenon of polygenesis 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 familiarlocal elements, frequently musical, are retained to avoid challenging the audience too much. This recurrent
patternwould form a well-worn path through Rice's three-dimensionalspace.
Korean ch'angguk opera conforms to the pattern not only in its relationship to colonization, but also in its relationship to decolonization. The closest analogy here is perhaps the Malaysiantheater form bangsawan. Sooi-Beng
Tan has shown that in the early 20th century, bangsawan was touted as upto-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 dramasbased on
national legends, in response to a growth in nationalist consciousness
(1989:252). "Sincethe 1970s," says Tan, "the Malaysiangovernment has created a 'traditional'past for bangsawan. Under state sponsorship, the popular type of theater has been reshaped, Malayized,and institutionalizedfor new
national purposes" (1989:230). This reshaping has involved the elimination
of non-Malaystories and musical features in order to "promote an artificial
'tradition' for bangsawan" as an expression of Malaysiannational 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'angguikCompany that is making a determined
bid for the genre's recognition as "traditionalKorean opera," while its colonial origins have been written out of most accounts of its history (e.g., Pak
199
Hwang 1976). The NationalCh'anggfikCompanywas established in the same

year, 1962, that legislation was passed to protect and preserve recognized
"traditional"genres like p'ansori as "IntangibleCulturalAssets" (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. Legitimacywas 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 MilitaryAcademy, served as officers in the Japanese 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'sobjectives, 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 "asif 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 happening on the third?" For instance, the parallel between ch'angguk and
bangsawan might lead us to ask, "Whena 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"dimension 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 traditionalethnography examines a single "point"within Rice's conceptual 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
200
would like to suggest that another useful way to think of the three-dimensional space he describes might be in terms of "topographies":the undulating, uneven surfaces of individual music cultures, of cultural groups or categories, 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" period of time intersects the "national"level of place in South Korea) would
have a corresponding altitude representing the dominant metaphor at that
particularjuncture (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 firstsight, 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 naturalobstacles. Once we have mapped
this topography, we will be in a position to ask why some paths have followed 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 experience in individualsubjects, ratherthan its value as a comparative framework.
But I would argue that its potentially global scope makes it an admirablevehicle for pursuing the bigger picture as well as the details. Like Rice's earlier
"remodeling,"it offers us "animage of fundamentalformative 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-
201
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
regularlycorrelated 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 considerations into our monographs themselves. Like the people whose musical 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, including the ethnographer, inhabits, if not the same space of musical experience,
at least a comparable one.
Acknowledgments
Myresearch 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 Dissertation WritingFellowship from the Universityof Washington, and a FirstYear
Assistant Professor Award from The FloridaState University. I am grateful to
Timothy Rice for providing the original impetus and organizing the conference panel from which this project grew, and to the editor and anonymous
reviewer for their thoughtful and thought-provoking comments.
Notes
1. In Book VIIIof The Confessions, Augustine recalled that as an adolescent he had prayed,
"Grantme chastity and self-control, but please not yet" (Augustine 1997:198).
202
Ethnomusicology,
Spring/Summer
2003
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, published 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 transformationof 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 Englishon Korean all-femaleopera 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 InternationalInstitute of Asian Studies (IIAS)at Leiden University, the Netherlands, on 23-27 August 2000. I am indebted to Hae-KyungUm, 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 Parsitheater and its influence, see Ali 1917; Cohen 2001; Hansen 1992:79-85,
1999, 2002; Yajnik 1934:90-98.
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Road Test for a New Model: Korean Musical Narrative and Theater in Comparative Context

Author(s): Andrew Killick

Road Test for a New Model:

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

Killick: Road Testfor a New Model

tempt a "subject-centered musical ethnography" in quite the way that Rice

Killick: Road Testfor a New Model