가야금 伽倻琴

The instrument

The movable bridges are called anjok, and sliding one changes the pitch of its string. There are two traditional forms. The older pungnyu or beopgeum gayageum, used for court and chamber music and lyric song, is about 160 centimetres long, its body hollowed from a single piece of paulownia wood, with the strings set wide apart for slow music. The sanjo gayageum, which appeared with sanjo in the nineteenth century, is shorter, about 142 centimetres, with a paulownia soundboard on a back of harder wood, and its strings lie closer together for fast passages. It is now the more common of the two. Traditional gayageum use silk strings, though some players have used nylon since the late twentieth century. Modern instruments with 18, 21 or 25 strings were made for new music.

The player traditionally sits on the floor with crossed legs, the head of the instrument resting on the right knee and the tail on the floor.

How to listen

The right hand plucks and flicks the strings near the bridge end. The left hand works on the other side of the bridges, pressing the strings to raise the pitch, to bend a note or to shake it in vibrato. The sound is soft and close, and the left hand gives it a voice: in sanjo much of the feeling lies in how a single note is bent and left to waver. In the court orchestra the gayageum is quieter, one colour among winds and fiddles, as in Yeominrak.

A short history

According to the Samguk sagi, a history of the Three Kingdoms compiled in 1146, the gayageum was made around the sixth century in the Gaya confederacy on the order of King Gasil, who had seen an old Chinese zither. He asked the musician Ureuk (우륵, 于勒) to write music for it. When Gaya was in danger, Ureuk took the instrument to Silla, where it was handed on. Archaeology suggests the instrument may be older still: fragments of a gayageum from around the first century BCE have been excavated in South Jeolla Province.

Sanjo, first created for the gayageum at the end of the nineteenth century, made it a solo instrument. Gayageum sanjo is played in many schools named after their masters, among them Kim Juk-pa, Sung Keum-yeon, Kim Yun-deok and Choi Ok-sam, and from the 1960s composers such as the gayageum master Hwang Byung-ki (1936–2018) wrote new music for it.

Start with

Hear the instrument alone in Gayageum sanjo, Kim Juk-pa school, played by Mun Gyeong-a with Jeong Jun-ho on janggu, at the National Gugak Center in 2014. Then compare its cousins in the journey step The zither family.

Questions

What is a gayageum?

The gayageum is a Korean plucked zither, traditionally with twelve silk strings, each on a movable bridge. The right hand plucks the strings, and the left hand presses them beyond the bridges to bend and shake the notes.

Is the gayageum the same as the guzheng or the koto?

No, but they are related. All three are long zithers with a movable bridge under each string. The gayageum traditionally has twelve silk strings, while the most common modern guzheng has 21 strings and its players usually wear finger picks.

How many strings does a gayageum have?

Traditionally twelve. Modern versions with 18, 21 or 25 strings were developed to widen the range for new music.