How Chinese influences shaped and reshaped Korean traditional music
Korean music and the force of Chinese influences
Politics, economics, society, and especially culture: among neighbors, exchange in these realms has followed a long and winding history. The resulting cultural diffusion is often described with a water metaphor—culture, it is said, flows like water from a high place to a low one. When we consider that historically powerful countries have passed their culture on to weaker ones, that comparison sounds plausible. Yet weaker nations have never been passive recipients of advanced culture. Instead, they have taken what they received, developed it, renewed their own national culture, and sometimes even exported it back. Cultural diffusion, it seems, works a little differently from water that flows only downhill toward the sea.
Korea has forged a brilliant culture across thousands of years. Like other countries, it has held steady cultural exchange with its neighbors and has eagerly absorbed outside influences.
Korea sits at the far eastern edge of the Asian continent. China lies to the west, Russia to the north, and Japan to the east. Cultural exchange has involved all these adjacent countries, but the connection with China stands out as especially important.
China exerted the strongest pull on the Korean peninsula not only because of its territory, population, and resources but also because of its deep history and advanced culture, always a few steps ahead of its neighbors. Music is no exception: any discussion of Korean traditional music must consider China’s part in it. What, then, did this Chinese influence actually look like?
Ancient contact through instruments
Many of the sources consulted by Korean musicologists when they study ancient music are Chinese historical works. The official Chinese histories—the Twenty-Four Chronicles—describe neighboring lands and peoples in every period, preserving records of ancient Korean kingdoms from the Han dynasty (206 BCE–221 CE) through the Sui (581–618) and T’ang (618–907) dynasties. Those fragments, together with documents and archaeological finds kept in Korea, give us a faint picture of early Korean society.
The first of the ancient Korean nations to thrive was Koguryŏ. Its representative instrument is the kŏmun’go. According to the Samguk Sagi (1146), the first history of the three Korean kingdoms—Koguryŏ, Paekche, and Silla—the kŏmun’go was developed by an official named Wang Sanak, who “re-made” a seven-string zither from Chin-dynasty China (265–420). Today the kŏmun’go remains a cornerstone of Korean tradition. But no instrument like it exists in China, nor does any Chinese instrument use the same playing technique, in which a bamboo striker called the sultae hits the strings as they are pressed against frets.
Because neither the shape nor the method is found in China, one might conclude the kŏmun’go was a purely Koguryŏ invention. That conclusion deserves caution. The writer of the Samguk Sagi, Kim Pusik, chose the word “re-made” (kaejak). The precise meaning is uncertain, but the term suggests a redesign of an existing prototype: Was the kŏmun’go simply a “re-make” of the seven-string zither from Chin?
Images of the kŏmun’go appear in tomb murals from as early as the fourth century and are also mentioned in Chinese literature. These murals show an instrument built in the modern fashion, differing only in string count and number of frets. The Chinese qin likewise changed little between antiquity and the present.
Apart from being horizontal string instruments, the qin and the kŏmun’go share little in structure or technique. At first glance they look unrelated. Some researchers view the kŏmun’go as having closer ties to Southeast Asian instruments such as Thailand’s chakay or Myanmar’s migyaun. Those are also played by striking strings with an implement against frets. Their sound worlds are quite different, yet the physical resemblance to the kŏmun’go is notable. Whatever that means, it may signal that Koguryŏ’s music was known beyond the peninsula, beyond China, across Asia.
The question of whether the kŏmun’go was wholly separate from the qin remains open. I am less concerned with whether it was truly “re-made” from the Chinese zither than with the view held by the Samguk Sagi author Kim Pusik—his historical outlook, his sense of beauty, and his aesthetic reading of the instrument. Kim Pusik lived in Unified Silla, the state that had toppled Koguryŏ with Chinese help. He wrote the Silla, Koguryŏ, and Paekche histories in a spirit of “serving the great” (sadaejuŭi). Writing had to be done in Chinese characters, and his work repeatedly emphasizes ties to China. For a historian committed to “serving the great” and steeped in Chinese aesthetics, it might not have mattered whether the kŏmun’go had originally been modeled on the qin. In those days music was more than entertainment: it governed the country. An instrument was not simply a sound maker. The Chinese qin was meant for cultivating character, not personal amusement. That aesthetic concept ruled Korea’s elite from Kim Pusik’s time until modern times—only the Korean elite substituted the kŏmun’go for the qin. In Kim Pusik’s mind, then, regardless of the kŏmun’go’s origin, it had to be described in relation to the Chinese instrument. Although the qin’s deep tradition has all but vanished in China today, the kŏmun’go still occupies a premier place among Korean instruments and continues to be loved. Those who seek to preserve ancient musical values still treat the kŏmun’go as an instrument of self-cultivation.
Medieval imports: Confucian ritual music
Korea’s medieval period runs from the Koryŏ dynasty (918–1392) through the middle of the Chosŏn era (1392–1910). The most significant musical activities in those centuries revolved around national events held at the royal court, particularly the importing of Confucian ritual music called aak.
Confucianism was the ideology of the medieval state, especially under Chosŏn. After overthrowing the previous dynasty, the new rulers needed to justify their revolution, reassure the public, and win support from powerful China. They adopted a timely ideology: the Chinese doctrine of ceremony (yeak). Based on the Confucian view of music, this doctrine had been China’s dominant music theory since the start of the Han dynasty (206 BCE).
This took a heteronomous position that made music a tool for the highest ruler. It aimed to raise public feeling, improve morals and ethics, and edify listeners politically and socially. Confucian philosophy was not the only approach in China, but it fit Korea’s preference for Confucianism well and so exerted long-term influence on the peninsula.
Since the nation was founded on Confucian thought, the rites considered most important used music taken from China’s ancient yayue tradition. In Korean, this music became aak. Aak grew from music imported from China in response to the needs of both society and state. It first arrived in the twelfth century under Koryŏ, but its golden age fell in the fifteenth century during the reign of King Sejong (1418–1450), Korea’s greatest monarch. At that time many scholars tried to revive the ceremonial music of China’s ancient Chou dynasty (ended 256 BCE). Eventually they created a new aak meant to carry on that older tradition. The project was enormous because no living model existed and researchers had to consult many Chinese literary sources. Almost six hundred years later, this recreated ritual music is still played the same way twice a year at the Confucius rites held at Sŏnggyun’gwan University.
More important than the performances themselves is how deeply Chinese Confucian music philosophy affected all of Korean court music. In modern times the word aak has come to describe every type of music performed at court, including the indigenous hyangak repertoire. This broad usage ties Korean court music to Chinese thought. The actual music, however, is stylistically unique: nothing like Korean court music exists in China today. Bowing to Confucian musical aesthetics, Korean composers created a slow, subdued, simple, yet impressive music—at once shaped by China and totally unlike it. The Korean aak that appeared among the court elite was conceptually shaped by Chinese example, but in its melodies, rhythms, and timbre, it was an original Korean invention.
Around the same period, another genre, tangak, reached Korea from China. Tangak began as popular sung poetry in Sung-dynasty China (960–1125). After entering Korea, it was performed in its original form for some time, but later turned into a thoroughly Koreanized version that survives today.
Think of the Buena Vista Social Club, the immensely popular ensemble that took Afro-Cuban salsa and made it its own. I believe a similar dynamic made Koreanization of China’s poetic-song tradition possible: a natural willingness to accept foreign music wholeheartedly, and the inside ability to turn that music into something native.
In this way, while Chinese influence strongly marked elite Korean music, the process of absorption completely transformed the imported material, creating a character unlike anything in China.
More instruments, more reinterpretation
The first example I gave of Chinese influence on Korean music was the kŏmun’go. Many other traditional instruments share a link with China as well.
My own instrument is the kayagŭm. Histories of the kayagŭm commonly refer back to Kim Pusik’s Samguk Sagi, where he writes that the zither was developed by the ruler of the small state of Kaya (about 42–562 CE) on a model of the Chinese ch’in. Looking at recent archaeological finds alongside the historical record, however, this story also seems to be a politically motivated narrative in the same “serving the great” spirit. The string instrument uncovered in southern Korea recently does not exactly match the kayagŭm in its modern shape, so we cannot say Kim Pusik is definitely incorrect. Still, to my knowledge no example of an instrument like the kayagŭm from before the Common Era has been found in China. Only instruments that resemble the se and the ch’in have been excavated.
The kayagŭm traveled to Japan, where a comparable instrument, the koto, still exists today. Like the Chinese ch’in and the Korean kayagŭm, the koto has thirteen strings, whereas the Korean version has twelve. The extra string gives the koto a sharp advantage in performance, so why did the kayagŭm keep twelve strings? There are many possible interpretations, but the one that has prevailed is that the instrument was meant to represent harmony between heaven and earth, reflecting the twelve months of the year. The concept of building cosmic principles into a physical object was known across East Asia, corresponding notably to ideas in the Book of Changes, one of the Chinese classics.
The Korean haegŭm is a bowed instrument, released from the nomadic peoples of northern China and carried to Korea by way of China. It resembles China’s erhu. However, the erhu has metal strings pressed against a fingerboard, while the haegŭm has silk strings, producing a wide range of color when string tension is manipulated by the left hand. Their origin is shared, but today the two instruments differ in construction, timbre, and technique. The erhu feels lively and responds well to fast passages—its main repertoire tends to be speedy—while the haegŭm really shines in slow, contemplative pieces, where left-hand pulls express subtle pitch changes.
The same kind of difference exists between the Chinese dizi flute and the Korean taegŭm. The dizi is typically fast, technically brilliant, and played in a high pitch range; the taegŭm occupies a low register, placing less emphasis on spectacular technique and more on depth and meaning.
These differences go back to a shared musical philosophy that Korea’s ruling class inherited from ancient China: in practice, that philosophy gave rise to a specifically Korean style entirely different from the music of China itself. Consider the representative string instruments of each country—the Chinese ch’in and the Korean kŏmun’go—and listen. Comparing those two worlds shows exactly how the music of China and Korea followed separate paths.
The music of the common people
Thus far we have looked at elite court music. The story of what may be called the “ruled class”—the general public—appears quite different.
Common people’s traditions were primarily vocal. Peasants and workers sang folk songs. Professional singers handled more musically elaborate song forms. In all these ordinary songs, each Chinese legend, poem, and historical figure vividly appears.
For example, the well-known children’s song “Moon, Moon” (Tara tara) includes the words, “Moon, moon, red moon, the moon where Yi T’aebaek used to play.” Yi T’aebaek is the celebrated Chinese poet Li Po. Not only professional pieces but songs sung by everyone—even children—are rich in Chinese references. That influence, however, extends no deeper than the mention of famous persons, events, or literary phrases; the melodies are wholly Korean and have no connection to actual Chinese music. The Chinese people, places, and words that make up the lyrics add a touch of elegance and show a culture improved through literature. The music itself carries no Chinese pull.
Through the lens of the visual
It is clear from the whole story that China powerfully influenced Korean cultural history for many centuries. The field that felt that influence most strongly, paradoxically, was the visual: visual arts such as architecture, handicraft, and painting, and less directly, poetry and the written art form equally grounded in writing. Even in those areas, Korea never merely borrowed; the Chinese model was lifted and advanced into something more refined, uniquely Korean.
By this view, Chinese weight was comparatively light in the purely aural field. Within music, Korean musicians accepted general philosophy and principle from China, but their instruments, tunes, rhythms, music and colored timbre were almost uninfluenced creations born locally. That may be why Koreans so often say that traditional music (kugak) is the very spirit of the nation.