SamulNori: Sustaining an Emerging Korean Percussion Tradition

What music should be sustained? Global efforts to preserve “traditional” music tend to reflect performance practices that survive among aging musicians or in archived recordings, photographs, and other documents. Reconstruction may be attempted as systems enshrine ahistorical forms as representative archetypes, but preservation is always situated at a specific point in time. As time passes, new competing musical forms emerge, become popular, and, inevitably, decline. How can new traditions be sustained where older musical traditions have already been embraced by a preservation system? How can creativity and development be accommodated within a preservation system? This chapter explores issues of preservation and sustainability by focusing on a Korean percussion genre, samulnori, developed by a celebrated quartet, SamulNori, which in recent decades has arguably been Korea’s most successful “traditional” music