Courtesy of Lee Hee-moon's Instagram

Many find gugak difficult to enjoy. Hard to understand. It feels slow and opaque. Perhaps we are too modern for it. Or perhaps we’ve grown used to music that does most of the work for us.

But, if you are searching for something that is Korean, something that sings to the soul of this nation, the wrinkles and warts of this culture, you needn’t look much further. For Koreans love singing. And the song of the people is, quite literally, "minyo."

This week I was invited to a spell-binding event. Part concert, part ritual, part cultural cosplay. A performance by famed singer Lee Hee-moon at the National Theatre of Korea. He began in the shadows. A dark staged flanked by six musicians dressed in all white revealed a hint of a silhouette. There, at the back, you could just make out what seemed like a towering figure. A gat adorned the head. The sleeves hung low. The shoes high. It was inhuman almost. Made all the more indescribable by the voice that emanated from the darkness. We stared into the abyss looking for the source of the sound. It almost felt like it was coming from the past.

That you hear Lee before you see him shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. He has become one of the most recognizable voices in the world of traditional Korean music, propelled to international fame by the incredibly popular gender-bending upbeat psychedelic sounds of "SsingSsing" and a Tiny Desk concert that has 10 million views. It is always interesting to note how any foreigner with an interest in Korean music and culture knows "SsingSsing" yet, at the same time, none of my Korean university students or friends do. It has achieved immense popularity abroad, and yet here the audience was much smaller.

But together, despite our size, we listened. Lee’s voice filling the room. A somber lament. Rising through the octaves in intervals that were as unexpected as they were uncomfortable. There was no autotune to hide behind. Just the sound of minyo — Korean folk music — and the tradition of expression. Not singing into the wind or waterfalls tonight, but rather the theatre.

The word minyo is originally a loan term, arriving from the German ‘volkslied’ via Japan. One of the earliest usages in Korean dates to the mid-1910s. By the mid-1930s, it was described in a newspaper like this: “Minyo come from the masses. They are songs passed down from the distant past, without known composers, and we do not know when they were created. To talk about their creation is very difficult. ... They are songs which we love deep down in our hearts; the reason we appreciate them is their deep roots.”

And people certainly did enjoy it. While K-pop is known for its lightsticks and fan chants, and international touring musicians regularly speak of the “daechang” (loud Korean singing), traditional music is the origin of all this: the "chu-im-sae." This is the technical terms for the exclamations and whoops that come from the drummer or the audience during a performance. From all around me in the theatre I heard different people let out a “jalhanda” (good job) as the evening progressed. One man behind me kept producing a low baritone bass note to accompany the music. It certainly wasn’t a night for sitting quietly on one’s hands but for shouting, and yelling.

The elderly women clapped gleefully in unison. Everything was in three. It was a waltz writ large. A galloping quality. Far removed from the 4/4 of modern pop music. And everyone seemed so friendly, welcoming. They all asked if I was coming back next time once the performance was eventually over. You would be forgiven for thinking it was a church at some point.

But if minyo are the folk songs of the past, the grit and grime of the commoner, why were all those in attendance seemingly closer to the "yangban" of the present? The National Theatre is a sanitized space, far from the bustling marketplaces or the rice paddies where these songs first took breath. So seeing this once apparently “low" art form of the masses consumed by a relatively "high" audience felt like a strange form of class tourism at times. Was it a genuine search for roots, or a safe, curated nostalgia for a struggle the modern person no longer has to endure? I kept wondering what it would have been like to witness all of this outside under the hot April sun of the 1700s, my body aching from slave labor, and makkoli burning my throat. Instead I clapped and shouted in my Italian shirt and felt the cool air conditioning soothe us.

Source: Korea Times News