Nathan Hesselink's book explores a contemporary Korean percussion ensemble, SamulNori, and the genre it has spawned, samul nori. The four musicians of SamulNori, playing two drums and two gongs, gave their first performance in 1978. Today, the genre is singularly popular, and has become the default form of Korea's age-old percussion bands on national and international stages. SamulNori first took to the stage as part of a larger group dedicated to finding new ways of staging folk music, and within four years they had established a set of relatively fixed pieces that today has canonical status. They soon embarked on a punishing schedule of highly visible international tours, and grew a fan base not dissimilar to those of pop stars. By 1987 they had established a collaboration with an Austrian/American jazz group, Red Sun, that lasted a further decade. They developed a pedagogical method, complemented by notations and workbooks. They worked with rap musicians, Korean folk singers, with pianists, zither players, both Western and Korean orchestras, and with shaman ritualists. They established a foundation, sponsored a biennial festival, and recorded many albums. Their music formed the basis of stage shows, most notably Cookin' (Nanta), and was blown up to epic proportions for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games.

There is, then, no doubt that a thorough account of the ensemble and the genre it spawned is long overdue. Although a considerable amount has been published in Korea, English readers have to date been restricted to a couple of PhD dissertations and a few articles, plus three inadequate chapters in one of my own books.Footnote ¹⁴ Hesselink leads us through the story with an account rich in history, aesthetics and analysis—with his exploration of specific samul nori repertoire illustrated by an excellent audio CD. He is always sensitive to Korean voices, matching interviews with musicians to journalistic reports and to a raft of pedagogical volumes and academic publications. Overall, the author's greatest strength is his ability to effortlessly blend recent anthropological and ethnomusicological theory with ethnographic data and, by doing so but unlike many regionally embedded accounts, he provides a bridge between the familiar and unfamiliar that will surely allow the volume to become standard reading.

The volume is divided into five chapters, topped and tailed by an introduction and conclusion. After setting the scene, the first chapter explores the itinerant troupes that in some incarnations were known as namsadang. SamulNori are positioned as a continuation of such troupes. Hesselink is heavily dependent on the accounts of one particular scholar, Shim UsŏngFootnote ¹⁵ who had developed his account through interviewing survivors of namsadang in the 1950s and 1960s; there is extremely scant historical data. Given that most commentators tend to see SamulNori as the inheritors of a broader percussion band tradition known as nongak or p'ungmul, and of local and regional styles as much as the itinerant tradition, this repositions our understanding. The second chapter takes us to the 1970s, a time when the state preservation system positioned “folk” music as an icon of identity, and a time of rapid expansion in Korea's concert culture. Hesselink explores three large halls that were built during the decade, and we hear how Shim and others, latterly including SamulNori, wanted smaller, more intimate spaces, and found them in the performance and exhibition venue, Konggan (Space), set up by an intellectual group led by the prominent architect Kim Sugŭn.

Chapter 3 arrives at SamulNori's music, and explores one single rhythm, the “five beat road rhythm” (och'ae chilgut), through Christopher Small's filters of locations, performers and audiences.Footnote ¹⁶ Hesselink opens with the rhythm as he was taught it by the regional percussion band of Iri in North Chŏlla Province,Footnote ¹⁷ and moves via the rhythm as played by the samul nori quartet at the state-sponsored National Gugak Center at a later time to SamulNori's rendition. Arguably this could be turned on its head, to give the SamulNori rendition precedence, since it has the greatest pedigree. Chapter 4 builds an aesthetic for SamulNori, one built on geomantic and Taoist principles found in Chinese philosophy that has over time become vital to their pedagogy and performances. The geomantic trinity of square-circle-triangle, one within another, becomes a way to visualize samul nori rhythmic patterns as wŏn-pang-kak or pattern–beat grouping–beat—although not mentioned here, something familiar to students of Korean musicology through the teachings of its sadly departed elder statesman, Lee Hye-Ku.

Chapter 5 shifts to the jazz collaborations of SamulNori. Core to these was the ten-year association between SamulNori and Red Sun, which resulted in four albums. Hesselink reviews these, showing how they evolved, the first leaving jazz as jazz and SamulNori as samul nori, the last blending the two much more successfully while rooting each piece in repertoire associated with Korea's different regional percussion bands.

The concluding chapter, while reflecting on SamulNori/samul nori thirty-five years on from its first appearance, manages to take a critical look at the South Korean preservation movement, arguing for evolution and development rather than the maintenance of unchanging “traditional” forms. This, while sensibly arguing against the UNESCO activities for intangible cultural heritage, and against the Korean top-down approach to preservation appears slightly ironic: the canonical pieces of samul nori allow little space for evolution and development, and in 2012 they continue to be performed virtually unchanged from the way they were thirty years ago.