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KOREAN STUDIES REVIEW
Voices from the Straw Mat: Toward an Ethnography of Korean Story Singing, by Chan E. Park. Hawai‘i: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003. xii, 345 pp. (B&W photos, figures) ISBN 0-8248-2511-X (hardcover)
reviewed by Roald H. Maliangkay
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands[This review first appeared in Acta Koreana, 7.2 (July 2004): 201-205. Acta Koreana is published by Academia Koreana of Keimyung University.]
Ever since 1963 when the Korean government appointed the solo narrative singing art of p’ansori Important Intangible Cultural Asset no. 5, the art form has gained much recognition both in and outside Korea. Some, if perhaps not all, “holders” of the tradition have become celebrated artists who struggle to find the time in between performances to teach a limited number of officially elected star students. The exceptional music they perform is very different from the popular music to which most Koreans are addicted, but the sheer magnificence of their voice as well as the narrative aspect of their art are usually effective in winning over the audience. Although p’ansori has thus become a common phenomenon, to most Koreans the very dynamic and expressive performances that are partly spoken partly sung using odd scales and an enormous variety of unusual voices are still a unique experience. It is perhaps why so many scholars have studied either the history or the practical aspects of p’ansori over the years. In Korea, at least, one finds a large volume of related studies, but only a few of these have been translated, and the number of related works available in English therefore remains small. Studies of the art have generally always been written by academics, with the role of performers “limited” to that of informant. Chan E. Park’s Voices from the Straw Mat: Toward an Ethnography of Korean Story Singing is to my knowledge the first academic work on the aspect of the art’s performativity written by someone who is both a professional practitioner and an academic.
The book consists of ten chapters including an introduction and conclusion, an eleven-page glossary and a ten-page (two-column) index. Eleven photographs are placed in the center of the book, while several figures have been added throughout the book to help clarify particularly complex matters such as pitch and vocal range. On the front cover one finds a picture of Park herself performing, which may wrongly suggest that the book deals mostly with the author’s personal experiences and dissuade those looking for a general history of the art. Although part of her study of the more contemporary developments and characteristics of p’ansori is indeed based on Park’s lessons with her late tutor Chŏng Kwŏnjin, it is more than adequately complemented with numerous comments and transcriptions of other singers and repertoires, as well as references to and ideas from related literature. The title, meanwhile, covers the content well as this is a collection of ideas on what, among other things, the words, the rhythm, and the individual performer tell us about the relationship between the performer and his or her audience both in the past and, albeit not to any great length, at present.
In the introduction, Park gives summaries of the five stories that form the basis of today’s repertoire and then moves on to define the art form while briefly relating its many different performative aspects. In doing so, she talks of the formation of repertoires, and describes the art’s place in contemporary society. Park also talks of how she herself came to be a singer, an account that surprisingly takes up roughly one page (pp. 17–18). The nine subsequent chapters that form the main body of the book are divided into two more or less equal parts. In the first two subchapters of the first part, ‘From Straw Mat to Proscenium and Back’ (pp. 25–154), the art form’s correlation with ritual, and the singers’ relationship with their patrons and audiences are explained in detail. Park describes the shaman origin of the art and argues that economic concerns greatly affected the art form. She notes, however, that when the performers began learning the complex texts by literati such as Sin Ch’aehyo, whether out of financial concern or vanity (pp. 82–83), it will have been a compromise:
[they] silently obliged even the most unrealistic prosodic demands to make singable what was unsingable: it was the language of their patrons and superiors, and their aim was to please.
In the third subchapter, Park discusses the efforts to modernize the art form in the early years of the twentieth century and relates the increasing competition the performers faced from all kinds of new forms of theatre. She also recounts the creation of ch’anggŭk, the multi-singer p’ansori theatre that was developed around the turn of the nineteenth century. Park explains the theories with regard to the emergence of this hybrid form and clearly sets out why she believes it was Chinese opera rather than kabuki that influenced the art. Rather than blaming Western understandings of modern drama that fail to recognize the dramatic potential of traditional performing arts such as mask dance (t’alch’um) and puppet theatre (kkoktukkaksi) (p. 91), however, it seems to me that the demise of these art forms lies in the fact that they did not adapt to modern times and the changing emotional needs when they were “dug up” after the liberation.
In part two, ‘Ethnography of a Voice’ (pp. 155–272), Park accurately describes the learning process, the different singing modes and their implications, and the rhythmic cycles. As in the first part, here she gives many excerpts from p’ansori texts as references, the translations of which are brilliant. Like most academic treatises on music, Park’s analysis of the tonality and vocal production are difficult to follow for those unfamiliar with the art, but her choice of words is admirably lucid and her figures are laid out well. In subchapter 7, ‘Negotiating Tradition, Gender, Self’, which I found to be one of most interesting subchapters, Park looks into the position of Korean women in Neo-Confucian society as negotiated by the art form. It is in this chapter in particular that the aspect of performativity comes to the fore. Park argues that whether it is sung by a man or woman, p’ansori in many ways crosses social or gender boundaries. Not only does it have a predominance of strong-hearted female protagonists in a world that at least for centuries denied women any significant role beyond the domestic sphere, but the singing may be said to follow a style developed and transmitted by male performers. The gender roles played by a performer go beyond the physical representation of characters. Park notes that the current tradition may discourage male singers “for fear their voices may be emasculated” (p. 228) and that at the same time women may feel the coarse vocal style challenges their femininity psychologically. The final two chapters relate the staging of the art in contemporary settings, and specifically in the West. I found Park’s recollection of performances particularly enjoyable to read. It shows how the art survives despite the convenience-store pace of everyday life and the audience that tends to be “subdued, too shy to respond, and too polite to walk away” (p. 240).
Park’s study is exceptional in terms of its mode of interpretation. Her style of enquiry is cautious and when she sometimes writes in the first person, it is as if she is taking you on a trip through the landscape of p’ansori studies, as if she too is merely an observer. The subchapters are mostly complementary to each other and probably do not stand well on their own, but they provide great material for discussion, even if or perhaps precisely because she does not try to answer all the issues they may raise. My main critique regards her sometimes overly objective view of academic debates. Despite the many interesting viewpoints this book offers, I still found myself looking for Park’s opinion too often. I expected to find out how she assesses specific issues or debates and, possibly, what wrongs may have been done by her academic peers, but rather than taking issues on, she often merely reports them. Park repeatedly embeds other people’s words in her sentences, as if she is afraid to be associated with a specific idea. Because of the numerous citations, usually without indicating the source in the text, the reader’s attention to the words between citation marks is too often demanded, which obstructs the speedy flow of the text. When Park makes a critical note, I found the fact that I sometimes had to look up the name of the source in the endnotes frustrating (p. 13). When she actually reacts to someone’s words, as in the following instance (p. 114), the absence of the author’s name puzzling:
This juxtaposition has been viewed as a thematic contradiction indicating the onset of modernity in Korea: While the surface motifs uphold the code of Confucian morality, “conflict among the dramatic characters betrays the inside story, the social awareness that struggles to be freed of the medieval social bondage.” [1] What does “medieval social bondage” mean? Does it refer to social mores or their application?
Perhaps Park intended to use the quotation marks in order to show that some ideas may still be subject to debate, but because she does not always engage these debates, her use of other people’s words comes across as overly political, especially when she relates issues that you would expect her, as an undeniable expert on the art, to have a clear opinion on.
Overall, the editing is good, and certainly merits praise where the wonderful translations are concerned. The layout is appealing and typos, which mostly concern romanizations, are few in number. Sometimes, however, words are not well explained, or explained long after they appear, such as in the case of “the ch’anggŭk experiment” (p. 15). In those cases, the glossary is not always helpful either, as it fails to list, for example, oryun (p. 6) and mu (p. 40), despite the fact that the terms are singled out in the text. Because Park’s approach is not chronological, but, rather, pursues specific viewpoints, this on occasion leads her to mention a specific issue more than once, when it is sometimes not properly dealt with until much later. On pp. 30–31, for example, she briefly explains how in “eighteenth-century Korea, Confucian scholarship and folk performance were two worlds far apart,” before coming back to the matter in subchapter 4, where she describes how the narratives reveal a far more complex relationship than this dichotomy suggests.
As an academic study of performativity this book contains many intriguing ideas and experiences, but it lacks a review of the social settings which one might expect to play an important part in the forms of communication Park relates. Misled by the personal image of the author on the cover, I was happy to find that the book does not try to launch the author as an important new medium, but I believe that her opinions are actually less evident than they ought to be. The book is perhaps best described as a collection of academic treatises on Park’s experiences as a professional singer, the intricacies of the art, and the numerous social issues through time. It may not, however, fully satisfy a novice to Korean studies looking primarily for information on the social perceptions of the art in contemporary settings given its national status. I believe those studying performance and society in Korea or beyond, but in particular those focusing on Confucianism or gender studies, will find the book very helpful and full of important new perspectives.
Citation:
Maliangkay, Roald H. 2006
Review of Voices from the Straw Mat: Toward an Ethnography of Korean Story Singing, by Chan E. Park (2003)
Korean Studies Review 2006, no. 13
Electronic file: http://koreaweb.ws/ks/ksr/ksr06-13.htm