Music of the Korean Renaissance by Jonathan Condit, a re-issuing of his 1984 edition, is an impressive compilation of the songs and instrumentations of fifteenth-century Korea. Designed primarily for the music practitioners oriented toward transnational performance, the book also contains a wealth of information for ethnomusicological research. Any attempt to introduce or explain the musical culture or repertoires of such a remote time and place as fifteenth-century Korea warrants a rigorous test of credibility. The author supports his findings with illustrative and historical references from such primary sources as Akhak kwebŏm (Standards of Musical Science, 1493) and Koryŏsa (History of Koryŏ, 1454) and perspectives from canonical modern scholarship on Korean and East Asian music. Part I: About the music includes a concise introduction of the source, history, and genre, with textual and instrumental examples. The practical suggestions included for playing or singing the musical pieces for practitioners of Western musical tradition reveal the author's enthusiasm to put fifteenth-century Korean music into transnational circulation. Part 2: The music includes an impressive volume of transcription spanning the entire surviving repertoire of that century, designed for use by students of Asian music as well as a general audience of musicians and musicologists. The ensemble scores include the lyrics in Romanized Korean and English translations, with additional transcription in Chinese character writing for some of the songs. For this review, I focus on the historical and descriptive accuracy, the significance of putting into Western staff notation the music of the fifteenth-century Korea, and the general discourse of trans-performativity of music across time and place.

An introduction of the performative context of Korean music in practice five hundred years ago is a feat of imagination as well as painstaking research. In introducing the variant Korean musical genres such as ritual, folk, court, or shrine, Condit probes their origins and influences, the process of naturalization of instruments or musical repertoires, and the contexts in which they may have been organized or evolved. In one instance, he observes from the diagrams in Standards of Musical Science that instrumental arrangements must have varied from one king's reign to the next (p. 41): the variant choreographic accommodation of dance may account for the variations in ensemble size. Condit also analyzes gender in Chosŏn courtly performance: women performed in secular music, while rituals were strictly the domain of male musicians. He points out the importance of props in dance, helping readers to make connections between the Korean dance culture of the past and the present.

As noted, it is Condit's primary goal to make the transcriptions suitable for singing and performance of fifteenth-century Korean music by occidental musicians. For those not attuned to the acoustic, lyrical, and rhythmic contours of Korean music, navigating by staff notation alone may be overambitious. When its first edition was published, audio cassette was still a luxury accompaniment. Technology has since advanced to audio or video CD as a staple companion of musical instructional texts. The inclusion of a CD would have considerably enhanced the nuanced usability of this edition. With wind, plucked string, percussion, and voice as the standard fifteenth-century Korean ensemble, Condit offers lists of suitable western instruments, with the conviction that such trans-instrumentation is in keeping with the Korean musical culture to perform “with whatever instruments and voices…available on a given occasion” (p. 51). His idea of fusion brings to the fore the question of cultural and aesthetic validity in transnational music making frequented today. As trendsetter of modernity, what cultural sensitivity would a transposed or transfused performance observe, and what aesthetics should it aim for? Korean music, let alone that of the fifteenth century, has rarely been introduced to the musicians of the Western world. On the other hand, Western music entered Korea throughout the twentieth century to be established as the “classical music” of the Korean cultural mainstream. Koreans adopted the whole of Western musical culture inclusive of the scores, stylistics, instruments, and pedagogical and performative systems, centers, and venues. It is only recently that some Korean composers and musicians began playing Western classical and pop music on Korean instruments. Condit justifies his Western adaptation of the fifteenth-century Korean music based on the long history of transcultural borrowings between Chinese and Korean musics (p. 45). The act of adaptation within the established Korean-Sino culture has a very different valence than the act of postcolonial discovery across hemispheric performance traditions. Without the necessary level of familiarity, the Western-trained musicians' interpretation of the fifteenth-century Korean music on the staff notation only may be more deconstruction than reproduction. The author, too, admits potential problems in tempo and intonation (p. 49). It would be worthwhile to evaluate if musicians have actually utilized the music scores included, and for what results or emergent creativities.

Where the notation alone is put to the task of ensuring acoustic and cadential verisimilitude, the accompanying narrative prescriptions on instrumentation are critical. Condit's description occasionally lacks the details. For example, “the left hand depresses the melody strings on the frets” (p. 32), a direction for playing kŏmun'go and kayagŭm, needs to specify which strings are to be depressed with which left finger and when. In romanizing Korean words, the author oscillates between the McCune-Reischauer System and the Yale System, thereby creating confusion as in the line, “TSYEK TEK PÔIK NYEN ei / HŬNG LYEI RAK hŏsini” (p. 29). With some improvements in details and supplementary audio materials, Music of the Korean Renaissance would be an even better resource for music scholars and practitioners.