산조 散調
Liner notes
Where court music is ordered and collective, sanjo belongs to one player. It is counted as folk music (minsogak), and the National Gugak Center calls it the form in which a player shows both skill and a personal reading of the music.
How to listen
A sanjo is built from a chain of rhythmic cycles, jangdan, played in a fixed order from slow to fast. It opens with jinyangjo, the slowest, and moves on through jungmori and jungjungmori to jajinmori and, in some versions, faster cycles still. So the piece gathers speed as it goes, and the slow opening lets the listener sink into the melody.
Within each cycle, listen to the melodic instrument's left hand. On the gayageum it presses the strings beyond the bridges to bend notes and make them waver, and much of the expression lies in these shadings of pitch. The music also moves between modes, of which gyemyeonjo is the most common.
The drummer sits beside the soloist and holds the cycle, and also calls out short shouts of encouragement, chuimsae. In a live performance the audience may answer with chuimsae of its own, as in pansori, the sung storytelling.
A short history
Sanjo grew out of older music: sinawi, the improvised ensemble music of shamanic rites, and pansori both fed into it. The musician usually credited with shaping sanjo is Kim Chang-jo (1865–1920), around 1890, though others of his time also played it. From the gayageum it spread to other instruments, the geomungo, the haegeum fiddle and the flutes among them; daegeum sanjo, on the large bamboo flute, followed in the 1920s.
Sanjo is learned from a master and passed on. Each version, or school (ryu), is named after the musician who first put its melodies together. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture lists eight schools of gayageum sanjo, among them those of Kim Juk-pa, Sung Keum-yeon, Kim Yun-deok and Choi Ok-sam. They differ in length, in the cycles they use and in their modes and ornaments: Sung Keum-yeon's runs to about an hour, while Sim Sang-geon's has only three cycles. Gayageum sanjo was designated an Important Intangible Cultural Property in 1968.
Kim Juk-pa was Kim Chang-jo's granddaughter. She began to learn the gayageum from him at seven, and after his death studied with one of his pupils, Han Seong-gi. Her sanjo builds on her grandfather's melodies with her own added, and lasts more than fifty minutes in full. It is known for its varied changes of mode and its subtle, deep vibrato, and it ends in an altered gangsanje mode rather than the gyemyeonjo the other schools close in.
Start with
Kotone has the Kim Juk-pa school, played by Mun Gyeong-a with Jeong Jun-ho on janggu at the National Gugak Center in 2014: Gayageum sanjo, Kim Juk-pa school. At about fifteen minutes, it is part of the full sanjo. For the gayageum's cousins, see the guzheng and the koto, and the journey step The zither family.
Questions
- What does sanjo mean?
- Sanjo (散調) means "scattered melodies". It is a Korean solo for one instrument with janggu drum, played in a sequence of rhythmic cycles that runs from very slow to fast.
- Who created sanjo?
- It is usually credited to Kim Chang-jo, who gave gayageum sanjo its form around 1890, drawing on sinawi, pansori and shamanic music. Other musicians of his time also played sanjo.
- What are sanjo schools?
- Each school (ryu) is a version of sanjo named after the master who first put its melodies together, such as the Kim Juk-pa or Sung Keum-yeon school of gayageum sanjo. Schools differ in length, rhythmic cycles, modes and ornamentation.