This book is the product of several decades of research on the Korean p'ansori, traditional solo epic story-singing. It is grand in scope and rooted in an impressive knowledge of the genre. For its historical inclusiveness and nuance, and for considerable content that is new in Korean music studies, it is an important addition to the scholarship of p'ansori and Korean music. While some more music-technical sections are intended for specialists, much of the book will be both accessible and useful to scholars and educators in Korean studies, East Asian performance studies, and ethnomusicology.

Korean Musical Drama is roughly divided into synchronic and historical parts. The first is a thorough analysis of p'ansori genre and style, based on the author's late-1980s dissertation research, focused largely on the epic Ch'unhyangga (Ballad of Ch'unhyang). Chapter 1 describes a typical late 1980s performance of p'ansori, chapter 3 introduces musical and literary conventions of the genre, chapter 4 overviews major styles, and chapter 5 looks at learning processes and individual style. There are other published English-language overviews of p'ansori as genre and style,Footnote ¹⁰ but what is unusual here, in addition to Um's thoroughness, is her agility in integrating social and textual analysis with a keen appreciation of musical sound, technique, and form. So much of the social power of p'ansori resides in its musical details—its timbral expressiveness, its melodic references to classes and genders, its rhythmic transformations—that this holistic analysis makes this book, to my mind, the most complete English-language portrait of p'ansori to date. Moreover, the author manages this in accessible prose, including a useful glossary of key music-theoretical and other terms.

The second half of the book deals with p'ansori’s complex history. Chapter 2 reviews contradictory scholarly theories of the genre's origin and provides a rich cultural history of the genre. Um pays particular attention to the nineteenth-century aristocracization of the genre, the transformation and mass mediation of the genre in the era of Korea's colonial modernization, and the postcolonial South Korean canonization of p'ansori as national culture. Chapter 6 is a partially historical analysis of p'ansori as an aesthetic system.

Chapters 7 and 8 are the book's most original contributions to p'ansori scholarship. Chapter 7 discusses the genre among Korean diasporas in China and the former Soviet Union; it is unique in considering the transnational life of the genre, and joins Andrew Killick's excellent In Search of Korean Traditional Opera Footnote ¹¹ in looking beyond the rather ossified performance of p'ansori as South Korean national culture to derivative genres. Chapter 8, on new p'ansori, deserves special mention, as it is devoted to a largely unknown world of new and often politically charged cultural production stretching through the minjung movement era into the present. This chapter describes the complex revitalization of the genre's traditional flexibility in the wake of its state museumization.

Setting aside minor issues—the many typographic errors, evocations of social theory that often add little, and the lack of engagement with a substantial amount of post-1980s Korean-language scholarship on p'ansori, for instance—Korean Musical Drama is a remarkable accomplishment. Some may feel it resembles a collection of articles, or two books in one. I personally wish the style chapters dealt a bit more deftly with history—with the instability of the genre and its structures. This instability comes through in the prose and casts doubt on the synchronic descriptions of style as systematic. The split nature of the book also means that it misses some opportunities to illuminate the social power of p'ansori in Korean cultural life. The late twentieth-century predominance of the sorrowful “Western Style” of p'ansori singing, for instance, has everything to do with the propagation of victim ideologies as the bonding force of postcolonial South Korean national identity; yet the synchronic discussion of style allows little space for such considerations. There are times, as in chapter 1's description of a “typical performance,” when the diversity of the field of cultural production and the instability of the categories undermine the coherence of generalizations about what is typical. Chapters 6 and 8 come closest to bridging the synchronic/historical divide; but another moment of incoherence comes in chapter 8, on the “new p'ansori,” which is sometimes described as mass culture, sometimes as popular culture, and sometimes as counterculture. The ambiguity arises from the fact that contemporary p'ansori is a complex field with unstable roles and different sectors that bleed into one another. This world deserves a more extensive treatment, and I hope the author will follow up on this work in ways that further help to close the rift between her fine historical and synchronic writing. This is not so much a critique as praise through faint damnation—essentially, I would have liked this book to be even longer.