“Daeguem Sanjo”

Solist: Pilki LeePlayed on the Korean flute Daegeum (also spelled Taegum).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgkZnu_F2p8

This music – Sanjo (“Scattered meoldies”) - is said to have originated in an ancient, improvisational
Korean shamanic music called Shinawi, in which the Daegeum is used to communicate with
ancestors, particularly featuring in funereal ceremonies to guide the spirits of recently departed into
the other realm.i In the modern era, starting around 1890 with the Gayageum (zither) master Kim
Chang-jo, several schools developed canonical forms of Sanjo in various modes, all sharing a strong
and initially understated rhythm on the janggu, a large double-skinned drum shaped like an
hourglass and struck with beaters. The janggu enters initially as a rhythmic embellishment, as
opposed to the prominent driving role of drums that typifies contemporary Western-influenced
music, with several beats or sometimes all of a given bar often omitted. The janggu player
accentuates certain beats with crisp vocalizations known as Chuimsae (“exclamations”), which
encourage the Daegeum player with statements such as “Yes!” and “That’s it.” This exchange
strengthens both the connection between the musicians and the excitement of the audience, similar
to the Jaleo (“uproar”) heard in flamenco ensembles. If our listening habits predispose us to
question: can these exclamations can be strictly considered part of the music, or rather merely an
aid to the music? The anonymous author of the Wikipedia page for Sanjo boldly declares: “Without
Chumisae, the music is meaningless.” I wonder what a Korean soloist would make of this
pronouncement.

Modern Sanjo generally features a gradual accelerando to a heightened, often galloping pace, with
the soloist delving into increasingly virtuosic territory. Further dimensions of tension are created
through a vast array of techniques, perhaps chiefly a bold and wide vibrato (far wider than that
typically found in Western or even other Eastern musics), fiercely articulated glissando, microtones,
and the movement between different registers - the lower bearing a gentler, more meditative
quality than the shrill and sometimes shrieking second and third – a function of the flute’s high
aspect-ratio.

There are other features, unique to the Daegeum amongst the world’s traditional flutes, which add
to the Daegeum Sanjo’s singular intensity. Firstly, the flute features a large buzzing membrane
between the blowing hole and the first tone hole, taken from the inside of a young bamboo reed on
the fifth day of the fifth lunar month in Korean tradition. This reed is carefully moisturized, dried,
stretched, crinkled, and attached with a glue made from animal hide to add an exciting distortion to
notes with increased breath pressure, a sound that to me evokes the shrieking calls of birds of prey.
Secondly, the blowing hole is around 2.5cm wide and 1.8cm deep, far larger than anything found on
other transverse flutes. Thirdly, it is constructed from the root end of a bamboo stalk, with the
blowing hole located beside the larger root end where the interior bore diameter actually constricts
– a situation opposite to the Japanese Shakuhachi as well as many Western wind instruments, with
their reverse-conical bores – further enriching the Daegeum’s unique timbre.

I find a further dimension of tension in the inherent instability of the Daegeum’s notes, which makes
me wonder: Is this aspect of tension perhaps a product of my encultured expectations of tonality,
with its insistent thirst for a perfect fifth that corresponds to the harmonic series? I have found
schematics for building Daegeums that list the tone-holes as having uniform widths and spacing,
save for one or two outliers. Further, I have constructed a far simpler bamboo flute and fine-tuned it
to the pitches of a Daegeum mode, as methodically deduced by researchers, and the pitches don’t
sound quite right to my ears. I wonder, is there an established pitch standard for the notes, with
crafters employing ingenious fine-tuning techniques to get all the registers clean, or does each
Daegeum vary according to the idiosyncrasies of each piece of bamboo? Are my reference pitches
taken from an older specimen, with more standardized tuning systems developed for the Daegeum
in more modern times? Could it be that the correspondence of musical modes to the harmonic
series is indeed somewhat universal, and that the idiosyncrasies of pitch in certain notes of the
Daegeum and other traditional Korean flutes in part inspired the wild, fluctuating vibrato that
typifies Shinawi and Sanjo? Do the vibratos and glissandi sometimes bring the naturally-blown note
more into alignment with a musically preferred pitch, and can those pitches be said to arise from
culture or human nature? My ears are not refined enough to settle these questions, but the
astonishing features of Daegeum Sanjo – which sound more avant-garde to my ears than anything
else I’ve yet heard in the world’s wind musics – implore me to persist in inquiring.

i
HEO, JI. "The Korean Tranverse Flute Taegum and its Music Taengum Sanjo." PhD diss., PhD
Thesis, Florida State University. Retrieved March 1, 2008, from< http://etd. lib. fsu.
edu/theses/available/etd-03132003-155125, 2003.