Aims of This Website

In 1997, while touring South Korea, I was fortunate to witness a SamulNori (four member percussion group) event performed as an outdoor concert in Seoul’s Insadong district. Whilst listening to the remarkable music performed by the ensemble, the sound, phrasing, rhythmic construction, and emotional contour of the music came as a revelation in which I could hear a rhythmic vocabulary that, when manipulated as an improvisational language, could allow one to navigate and create complex, flowing rhythmic structures. The experience led to a transformation of my conception of the drumset and my approach to the organizing rhythmic material.

Following many years of engaging with Korean musicians through study and collaboration, my approach to the drumset is now grounded in a vocabulary which represents a personal response to rhythmic forms, sticking variants, and developmental procedures appearing in Korean music.

It should be stated that material appearing here does not aim to re-imagine Korean instruments such as the Korean hour-glass drum on the Western drumset. In most examples of my own performance practice, such as examples appearing on audio files on this site, Korean rhythmic materials are employed in such a way that they may be unrecognizable as being of Korean origin.

It is my hope that through this website drumset students may gain a deeper understanding of Korean rhythmic forms and the potential for such material to be employed in an improvised manner removed from the context of traditional form and function.

This website aims to introduce drumset students to rhythms, aesthetic concepts and musical processes appearing in Korean traditional percussive music and offers a method for adapting these musical resources to the drumset. Materials appearing on this site will focus on rhythmic forms found in the music of SamulNori, and shamanic music performed by a community of ritualists from Korea’s East Coast led until recently by extraordinay multi-instrumentalist Kim Seok Chul.

Material found on this website, which may be summarized as the “Koreanisation” of the drumset, features several key goals, involving:

• The development of an improvisational language for the drumset based on Korean rhythmic materials malleable to a wide range of musical contexts.

• Introduce students to several introductory themes appearing in the music of Samulnori adapted for the drumset including tasurum, ch’il ch’ae, o’chae, as well as the developmental piece SamulNori Drumset.

• Introduction to Korean conceptions of rhythmic tension and release and the developmental procedure termed here as serial amplification.

• Overview of Korean approaches to physical aspects of percussive performance including the unique concept of Hohup.

• The development of a system of four-way drumset creative coordination based on rhythmic models and organisational principles found in the music of SamulNori.

• The creation of a series of “Koreanised” rudiments for the drumset, featuring stick pattern variations found in the music of SamulNori and ritual music from Korea’s East Coast.

In addition to compositions and exercises for drumset, this website explores Korean rhythmic concepts including changdan, karak, as well as rhythmic development processes such a “serial amplification”.

I would recommend reading the analysis sections before beginning exercises so as to get a feeling for Korean conceptions of rhythm. As you play each piece more and more and become familiar with the material, I would recommend revisiting the analysis sections so as to delve further into the improvisational and conceptual possibilities contained in these rhythms.