Kim Heung-gyu
1) What is Pansori?
Pansori is a form of oral narrative poetry and recitation that became—and still is—widely popular in Korea beginning about the 17th century. Although its outlook and its aesthetic pretensions were both humble and unassuming the skills required for its successful performance were many and varied, contributing to its wide-ranging popularity in late Yi dynasty. With the great transformations that have overtaken Korea during the 20th century, many of the folk arts spawned by traditional Korean society have lost their vitality and become extremely narrow in focus but pansori has retained much of its former popularity. Still today it continues to attract good audiences to its performances, by turns making them howl at its comic elements and its lampooning of old social taboos and by turns sobering them up with its dramatization of the darker, tragic side of life. These dramatic elements and the musical and dramatic skills with which they are brought to life have underwritten pansori's wide acceptance by modern audiences.
A pansori performance is extremely simple in construction. There are only two performers on stage, the singer and his drummer accompanist. The singer generally stands and either sings or narrates to the accompaniment of the drummer and that is all there is to it—there are no other props or personnel involved.
This simplicity allowed pansori to be performed under a wide variety of conditions. It was performed in intimate settings like the front porch or yard in privileged households, or out in wide, open spaces such as the market-place. It could also accommodate many different audience sizes, from the small households of patrons to crowds of thousands.
It goes without saying that to be master of these very diverse conditions of performance with their demands on acoustics control and audience rapport was an exceedingly difficult undertaking requiring long training. Celebrated pansori singers are on record as saying that even those possessing high natural ability would need to go through about ten years’ rigorous training to attain proficiency in the art. Absorbing the story-lines and story-telling skills from their masters, and bringing their musical skills up to standard were a long and arduous process. Training the voice meant seeking out and mastering diverse acoustical conditions from still mountain temples to roaring waterfalls where the voice would be strained to the limit to gain strength and control. When in performance the singer was expected to exercise control over the various changes in dynamics, pitch and tone while preserving perfect clarity.
This rigorous training was a requirement forced on the pansori singer because, unlike other folk-art performers, he lived or died on the audience’s responses. Always at their mercy, he could rise to gain the title of gukchang, or national singer, with the honours and riches that went with it, but to all those whose talents passed unrecognized there was the usual insecure existence eked out by the profes-sional entertainer in traditional Korean society.
The standard pansori repertoire consisted of twelve pieces, including such famous tales as Chun-hyang, Shim Cheong and Heung-boo. In approaching these works the singer would have to get the measure of the story line, its atmosphere and formulate the music to bring out the individuality of each character and the psychological shifts their roles entailed. The recitation itself required clear, vernacular language to recount the narrative and conversational passages and high musical attainments for the song passages.
According to the length of the work and the conditions of performance, the time taken for a complete recitation varied but it was never short. The more popular the work the richer and more variegated it would become and with these various embellishments the length of a work would grow. So it is that the most famous of the five works still actively performed, Chun-hyang, would take seven or eight hours to perform in its entirety and of the other four, The Red Cliffs is the shortest at two to three hours.
No one is quite sure where the term pansori comes from. It is clear that the term is a combination of pan with sori.
The meaning of sori is clearly “sound” or “song” but pan has various meanings ranging from a musical form to a gathering place. “Songs set to music” or “songs for gatherings” — either description fits the reality of pansori.
2) An Outline History of Pansori
There are few written records to assist us in reconstructing the early history of not just pansori but all the traditional Korean folk arts, for such endeavours were regarded with disdain by the literate and intellectual class. Such records as we have are in the form of disparaging references to the evil influences exerted by folk arts (including pansori) on legitimate (i.e., Chinese language) literary pursuits, or else pertain to the 19th century, a comparatively late period in pansori history. The result of this state of affairs is that the early history of pansori is the subject of much conjecture.
For various reasons the most persuasive theory on the origins of pansori is that it grew out of mudang-gut performances, or shamanistic ritual incantations, as practised in the Jeonra region in south western Korea.
The hereditary mudang, or priestess, is called a tangol in the Jeonra Province and she takes the leading role in exorcistic ceremonies while her male assistant provides the accompanying music. It is generally true of all hereditary mudangs in Korea, that the line is female-centred with the mother passing on her role to the daughter-in-law, while the men of the family were the musicians. If their talent warranted it, the men could also give professional performances as entertainers or singers and so in traditional Korean society there existed a close relationship between mudang households and professional entertainers.
In the world of the professional entertainer the highest calling was that of singer and those whose vocal ability prevented this generally became musicians. In the absence of musical ability one was reduced to being a tumbler or an acrobat. This incentive of status made it easier for the talented musicians from mudang households to gradually break free and build up an independent folk-art genre and judging from the known cases of early pansori singers coming from such a background it seems most likely that this was how pansori came about as an art form.
There are various points of similarity between the Jeonra Province exorcistic narrations and pansori singing, They are both protracted oral narrative forms and both combine spoken word and song elements, In addition to this they share many elements of actual vocal technique, Evidence such as this also supports the above theory.
However, there still remained some important differences between these two forms, The chief character in an exorcistic narration possessed great power and was an object of veneration with its ability to accomplish what ordinary mortals could not. It is a domain where magic and spiritual power rule the destinies of men. Pansori, on the other hand, was very much attached to this world. It mostly drew its material from the ordinary lives of people and generally resolved them with little reference to spiritual or magical intervention.
There was also an external factor at work In the rise of pansori, for its early history was greatly Influenced by the changes that were starting to overtake middle and late Yi dynasty society. The many disturbances to what had constituted traditional Yi dynasty social order had the effect of enfeebling the mudang class and means of mutual self-help achieved a greater significance than reliance on the magical properties of exorcism. One example of this process of change was the steady broadening of the word gut, or exorcism ceremony, from its narrow mudang connotations to a much wider and general meaning of "public spectacle".
In addition, the appearances of audiences far more partial to realistic entertainment was another sign of the times and this further narrowed the Jump that male mudang assistants would have had to make from their hereditary profession to the new profession of pansori singer, Judging from various sources this process started about the middle to late 17th century.
Naturally, the pansori form required a good deal of development over the exorcism narrative, Magical properties had formerly been a prime consideration with entertainment only a secondary function but now in the choice of material and the techniques of presentation more variety had to be sought to attract and sustain the audience interest necessary to ensure their survival as professional entertainers, For material they turned to traditional stories and legends, rather than create any new ones themselves, Not only were these stories already known and loved by the audience but they provided an essential element of structure in their story-line, which could lend itself easily to the embellishment and elabora-tion that was the showcase for a pansori performer's skills, In time this basic material came to form a stable repetoire of twelve pieces handed down from generation to generation from master to pupil and finally written down In the early 19th century in a collection that has survived to this day.
The twelve pansori comprise five that are still actively performed—Chun-hyang, Shim Chong, Heung-Boo, The Sea Palace (Sugung-ga) and The Red Cliffs (Jeokbyeok-ga)—along with seven others that ceased to be performed around the end of the 19th century. These twelve evolved during the course of the 18th century and in the process became the staples of a genre that possessed a high level of attainment both as literature and as music. One early indication of this is the composition of the story of Chun-hyang in song form by a member of the yangban class, Yu Chi-han, in the mid 18th century. Yu had been inspired to write down the story after watching it performed during a trip to the Jeonra region and it is evident from his work that Chun-hyang possessed enough artistic merit to arrest the attention of and then inspire a member of the yangban class, a class that had a deeply entrenched distaste for popular art forms.
The pansori that Yu would have seen was still entirely a popular art form, possessing none of the characteristics of yangban artistic concern.(In fact, Yu was elsewhere criticized by his contemporaries for conduct unbecoming the dignity of a yangban and his more than passing interest in pansori was no doubt an element behind this criticism,) Both performers and audiences were all from the commoner class at this stage and pansori naturally reflected their class outlook and aesthetic, The performers drew a good deal of material from out of the experiences and concernes of the commoners for their narratives while their music incorporated folk song and popular incantation elements, Contemporary references, and satire directed at sources of social oppression also featured a good deal in pansori performances and all these elements gave it a very strong commoner class outlook.
Towards the end of the 18th century, however, pansori entered upon a new stage of development, for it began to attract a substantial yangban audience. This did not come about suddenly but rather as the outcome of a long and gradual process. The main channels by which pansori and other folk arts might come to the attention of yangban audiences were either by the activities of itinerant entertainers or else by the custom of including them in banquet entertainments, especially post-examination revels, and 60th birthday celebrations. Most of the skills on display on these occasions seem to have elicited no more than passing Interest from the yangban audience but with pansori it was different. Pansori now had a fairly long line of development behind it, during the course of which it had acquired a good deal of skill in presentation. Its economy of personnel and props, varied and interesting story lines and by now deep musical sophistication were all features that made it congenial to yangban temperament and aesthetic sensibility, and now through sponsored performances within yangban households began to acquire a sizable yangban audience.
This change in audience brought about changes in the profession, Standards of performance began to be fixed and the lineages of celebrated singers who were now receiving official recognition began to be preserved, singers of the first rank acquired the title of myeongchang (Famous singer) and with it ample reward for the long and arduous training they had undergone,. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries eight singers were honoured with this title and passed into history as the Eight myeongchang, evidence of their profession’s growing status and a spur to younger practitioners to excel.
Naturally enough, along with this recognition came an increased sensitivity to yangban taste, Of course, the bulk of their audience was still drawn from the lower classes but they could not compete with the yangban few when it came to artistic influence. Directly related to this was the reduction of the repertoire from twelve to five that occurred in the course of the 19th century, for the works dropped were precisely those that most reflected the com-moner world view and aesthetic outlook. Presumably their downfall started as the occasions on which they were performed for yangban audiences dwindled.
Although the loss of exclusive commoner class patronization did lead to the loss of some of pansori's verve, on the other hand its contact with the yangban class produced great strides forward in its musical techniques and staging. Various schools of voice technique emerged and each helped to broaden the pansori tradition, while more subtlety in dramatic effect was made possible by the more intimate surroundings in which pansori was now staged.
As pansori entered the 20th century it encountered the tremendous upheavals that political events had worked on the traditional way of life in Korea and its art forms. Yangban patronage declined as the class itself declined, forcing some singers to seek out stage theatre audiences, while others advanced into the area of singing drama with a different singer for each role and full dramatic action in a stage setting. However, while initial efforts in these directions met with some success, they were soon effectively balked by the generally repressive nature of Japanese colonial policy towards indigenous Korean art forms. Since 1945 pansori has been allowed to flourish once more and has enjoyed a good measure of official support. Seasons of pansori performances are frequently held in Seoul theatres and are often aired on both radio and television.
3) The Twelve Stories in the Pansori Repertoire
As we have already mentioned, there were twelve stories in the pansori repertoire in the early 19th century. Only five are performed today but there is evidence that all twelve were performed up to about the turn of the century. Although there would be prescribed librettos for each of these stories they were not necessarily followed in actual performance. The libretto was usually more of a plot outline with some guidelines as to the music that went with it. Depending on the actual performance conditions the singer would vary this content and improvise on it in order to generate a full emotional flow from the audience. A singer who could not do this could not hope to be recognized as a first rate pansori singer. Bearing in mind this fluidity of content, let us look at the twelve pansori stories.
Chun-hyang
Chun-hyang is the most popular pansori work and one of the most highly regarded works of late Yi dynasty literature. Central to the story is the dramatic separation and reuniting of two lovers against the background of social class discrimination and corrupt officialdom in the late Yi dynasty.
One blossoming May, Chun-hyang, daughter of Wolmae, a retired gisaeng, was playing on a swing in a grove when Yi Mong-ryong, sicon of a yangban family and son of the magistrate of Namwon, passed by and fell in love with her at first sight. His love is returned and despite the great social gulf that lies between them they contract a marriage and swear eternal fidelity. Their idyll is cut short, however, when shortly afterwards Yi’s father is re-assigned to a position in Hanyang and the family has to leave Namwon. Yi is forced to leave Chun-hyang behind because she would be unacceptable in capital society and this would reflect on the whole family. Despite her remonstrances, he leaves her, promising to return as soon as he can.
Soon afterwards, Yi’s father’s successor, the evil Byeon Hak-do arrives. He is covetous of beauty and has heard tales of Chun-hyang’s great beauty. He eagerly inspects the ranks of Namwon gisaengs but does not find her there. When he is informed that she does not have gisaeng status he nevertheless orders her brought before him on the pretext that her mother is one. Chun-hyang resists his advances whereupon Byeon has her flung into prison and tortured.
Meanwhile, Yi Mong-ryong has passed his government examinations in Hanyang and at his own request is assigned to the Jeonra region, the area where Namwon is situated, as a secret government inspector. On the way to Namwon he hears tales on Byeon’s misdeeds and decides to enter Namwon disguised as a beggar. He manages to penetrate the prison where he has a tearful reunion with Chun-hyang. The following day he attends a banquet given by Byeon where he composes a poem in public as follows:
The sweet wine in its golden cup is the blood of a thousand poor souls,
The savoury sweetmeats in their jade tray are the oil of many fair citizens.
When the banquet’s first flask flows so do the tears of the people
And where sound of banquet songs rises high the sound of grievances rises still higher.
After which he reveals his identity, has Byeon dismissed from office and is reunited with Chun-hyang.
Into this plot were inserted various interpolations, mostly critical of aspects of late Yi dynasty society, and because it was a vehicle for such sentiment Chun-hyang has not only gained prime popularity as a pansori but is regarded as an important example of the outlook and concerns of late Yi dynasty popular literature.
Heung-boo
Among the 12 pansori, Heung-boo and The Sea Palace are the stories that most clearly show the influence of traditional popular story-telling. Heung-boo’s story-line has many counterparts in other cultural traditions.
The story of Heung-boo centres around two brothers, Heung-boo and Nol-boo. It opens with Nol-boo inheriting all the family possesions and driving his brother and family out of the house with no means of support. Heung-boo then enters upon a purgatorial existence, eking out a living at various low jobs and suffering various trials and tribulations until one spring when he comes across a swallow that has fallen from a carrying basket and broken its leg. Heung-boo mends the leg and the following year the swallow returns to him bearing a gourd seed from which spring forth many treasures, making Heung-boo a rich man.
When Nol-boo hears of this he strives to emulate his brother’s success by deliberately breaking the leg of a swallow and mending it. The swallow flies away and the following year returns with a gourd seed but this time instead of riches and treasure, all manner of evil and calamity rains down on him and he is ruined. When Heung-boo hears about his brother’s misfortune he hastens to help him, and the story ends with them living happily reunited once more.
The plot has a fairy tale-like quality to it in its simplicity and to Confucianists it represented an ideal of the older brother-younger brother relationship. It goes a bit further than that, however, for unlike its folk-tale forebears Heung-boo possesses elements of social criticism, chiefly expressed through the vicissitudes Heung-boo undergoes while wandering in poverty. In addition, while Nol-boo’s greed is duly criticised, there are also passages in which a rather grudging respect is admitted for his thrift and business-sense, the hardheadedness with which he sets about protecting his birthright. He is primarily seen as a villain but the frankness with which he sets about the improvement of his lot in defiance of Confucian morality is held up as a somewhat positive quality. One commentator has gone so far as to suggest that in their contrasting characters and fates the two brothers symbolize the declining petty gentry on the one hand and the rising commoner on the other hand.
Shim Chong
On to an old and grim tale of human sacrifice to appease implacable natural elements a strong Confucian moral twist was added to the traditional tale of Shim Chong, making it by far the clearest expression of traditional Confucian morality in the pansori repertoire.
In the Hwanghae Province, there lived a blind man, Shim Hak-kyu. The descendant of a yangban line, his affliction has reduced him to penury and total dependence on his wife for a living. She gives birth to a daughter, Shim Chong but dies soon after. The father brings the daughter up and she in turn cares for him.
Then calamity befalls when Shim is induced to pledge a huge amount of rice to the local Buddhist temple after being told by a priest that if he did this then the Buddha would restore his sight. Shim has no means to back his pledge and when Shim Chong hears this she decides to sacrifice herself to enable her father to redeem the pledge. At this point a boatman enters the scene seeking to purchase a young maiden to be used as a human sacrifice to appease the Dragon King of the Sea. Shim Chong sells herself to him for the price of her father’s pledge and on the next voyage is duly sacrificed.
However, Shim Chong does not die but is saved by the Sea Dragon and sent floating back to shore inside a lotus flower. Some fishermen discover the flower and, struck by its unusual beauty, they make a present of it to the Emperor. The Emperor is currently in a state of grief over the recent loss of his consort and when he opens the flower to reveal Shim Chong he is delighted and makes her his new consort. Now empress, Shim Chong gives a banquet for all the blind people in the land, hoping to meet her father in the process. All the blind in the land are summoned to the palace and on the last day of the banquet her father, who has been living in abject poverty, still desperate with grief over the loss of his daughter, comes to the palace. Upon meeting his daughter and hearing her voice his sight is instantly restored and they live happily ever after.
Shim-Chong is a story of superhuman sacrifice and filial piety, a hybrid theme of the sort that occurs in several other pansori. It is also a tale of greed and folly, most notably in the person of Ppaengdok, the evil woman into whose clutches Shim falls after losing his daughter. This sequence seems so strikingly at odds with the rest of the play that it continues to strike modern audiences as rather strange. As we have already observed, however, this sort of disconsonance is well within the mainstream of pansori, where no set mood is prescribed for the duration of a performance but rather elements of comedy, farce and tragedy are presented alongside each other.
The Sea Palace (Sugung-ga)
The Sea Palace is a story from the animal world with a human moral. Also known as The Song of the Hare (Tokki-taryeong) it is one of two animal stories in the pansori repertoire, the other being the Tale of Cock Pheasant (Changkki-taryeong). It is obviously drawn from a traditional fable and points of similarity have been noted between it and one of the stories from the Indian collection of Buddhist fables known as the Jataka Tales, which had probably become known in Korea during the course of the absorption of Buddhism.
Once there was a Dragon King who ruled the Kingdom of the Sea. He was a pleasure-loving monarch but alas, too much so, and he eventually fell ill as a result of his excesses. His doctors were perplexed by the strange malady he had contracted and to disguise their ignorance they simply told him that only the liver of a hare could cure him.
There upon the king summoned all his aquatic subjects to discuss how to obtain this remedy and after much heated debate the turtle was selected to go and seek it out as he could survive on land as well as sea. The turtle duly departed and eventually came across a hare whom he enticed back to the Sea Dragon Palace with promises of riches.
As soon as they got there, however, the hare realized that he had been deceived and quickly thought of a strategy to escape. When the Dragon King asked him to lay down his life and yield up his liver for the remedy the hare replied that he’d be only too glad to, except that he hadn’t brought it with him. With the king’s permission he’d could return and get it. So convincing was he that eventually the king had the turtle take him back to dry land whereupon the hare simply bounded away to freedom, laughing all the while at the foolish turtle.
As will be appreciated from this outline, the mood of this pansori is essentially comic, a lampoon of the follies of regal power that probably would not have been permitted had it not been couched in animal metaphor. The two main protagonists are the foolish Dragon King, seeking to exercise his prerogative of life and death over the innocent hare and the hare himself, the cunning commoner. It is no coincidence that the social and political symbolism these two characters carry is mostly transmitted in the passages that are clearly pansori embellishments on the original tale.
The Red Cliffs (Jeokbyeok-ga)
The Red Cliffs is the only pansori constructed out of an incident in an actual novel. The novel in question is Romance of the Three Kingdoms (San kuo chih), a 3rd century Chinese work that is one of the most famous works of Chinese literature. It had been well known in Korea for centuries before the emergence as a pansori of one of its best known and loved episodes. It should be added, however, that such are the embellishments and alterations that the basic story underwent before it emerged as one of the five core pansori that it really became an independent work.
Perhaps the most striking alteration is the increased stress laid on the horrors of war as experienced by the ordinary soldiers under their commander Ts'ao Ts’ao, and the bitter humour directed against Ts’ao himself. The way in which the soldiers mock their predicament in war is an especially good illustration of the commoner class outlook. Another embellishment is in the actual battle descriptions, which possess a vividness and tension that are not to be found in the original.
We don’t know when The Red Cliffs was first developed as a pansori but the fact that it drew in an established work of literature suggests that it came after the initial period of pansori adaptation, for the hallmark of this early stage seems to have been its reliance on folk tales and legends for stories, rather than on established works of literature.
The above five works are usually known collectively as “The Five pansori Songs”. They are the only ones left that are still actively performed. The remaining seven that we know of exist in the form of librettos or other forms of literature and so their features are rather less discernible. However, they merit attention none the less for the additional light they help shed on the pansori tradition. They are as follows:
Byeon Gang-soi
The only surviving text of this pansori is in the collection made by Shin Jae-hyo in the middle 19th century. It was not his creation, of course, but as with the others he recorded it was as the work had been handed down to his generation by others that he wrote it down. Probably the most distinctive feature of it is the way sexual desire is a moving force in the plot and the source of most of the work’s comedy.
Ong-nyeo, a widow seems to possess evil powers, for all the men of the village who have any dealings with her die in mysterious circumstances. Eventually she is driven out and while wandering the countryside looking for a new home she meets and takes up with a gentleman by the name of Byeon Gang-soi. No sooner does this happen than she is again made a widow as Byeon falls victim to a curse that had previously been laid on him for chopping up a village totem pole for firewood. The subsequent action revolves around her attempts to get rid of the body. Drawn by her beauty, a succession of doubtful characters offer their services with the idea of moving in afterwards but every time one of them touches the body he ends up sticking fast to it. Similarly stuck are the ones that come to free them.
Byeon Gang-soi is basically a farce with strong supernatural overtones and many of its characters are drawn from the commoner class. Behind the comedy, however, there lies more than a hint of sadness as is the case with most pansori.
Bae Bijang
Like Byeong Gang-soi, this pansori gains its title from its leading character, a man of high moral pretension who succumbs to the charms of a vixen. The theme is a universal one, given extra point in middle to late Yi dynasty times by the extreme tendencies then showing in Korean Confucian morality.
The Cock Pheasant (Changkki-taryeong)
Like The Sea Palace, this pansori uses animal characters to mirror human foibles. The story centres aroun