Pansori was music for the common people. In the old days storytellers would read books for illiterate people, acting many characters to make the story more realistic and fun. Pansori may have very likely evolved from this type of storytelling, as people added melodies and mimicked characters to develop a new discipline of performing arts. By the end of the Joseon Dynasty, kings, royal family, and noblemen all came to enjoy pansori. To appeal to a more educated audience, Chinese poems or idioms were included in pansori lyrics. But lowly clowns, too ignorant to understand the complicated lyrics, improvised the words – just jumbles of intelligible phrases really – during their pansori performances. During the Japanese occupation, there was one performer who attempted to remove all traces of nonsense from pansori. He was pansori master Kim Yeon-su, and in today’s Sounds of Korea, we follow his life and music.

Some Parts from Chunhyangga / Sori Kim Yeon-su

That was pansori master Kim Yeon-su performing some parts from Chunhyangga, describing how young lover Lee Mong-ryong, mesmerized by Chunhyang’s beauty, is unable to focus on his studies. Kim was born in Goheung in South Jeolla Province in 1907. He had studied Chinese literature in a local village school until he was 14 years old. After graduating from Goheung elementary school, he attended Jongdong Middle School, receiving what is considered high-class education among sori performers. When he finished school, he went back to his hometown to take up farming like his father. Then one day he heard the singing of sori masters on the radio and was instantly captivated by the sounds. He started studying sori when he was 29, an age deemed too old to learn the art of pansori. After learning Sugung-ga under master Yoo Sung-jun, Kim Su-yeon joined a society of Joseon vocalists, where he studied five pansori pieces from renowned performers of the time. Although he was certainly talented, he had to practice much harder than his peers, because his voice was rough and didn’t have enough volume. On top of it, as a result of his work to restore original pansori words mangled by street performers, his accurate pronunciations of the lyrics made the pansori pieces sound overly pompous. His fellow pansori performers criticized him for ruining the sound while trying to bring out the hidden meanings in the lyrics.

Some Parts from Sugung-ga / Sori Kim Su-yeon

That was pansori master Kim Su-yeon performing the part in Sugung-ga in which the turtle first ventures out to the land. In 1967 Kim attempts to broadcast the recordings of all five major pansori works. He worked on the recording for three to four hours every day, and all five pansori pieces were aired in ten-minute segments, totaling 140 broadcasts. That was back in the days when people’s love for pansori ran deep, so the recordings were turned into soundtrack albums, which still exist for us to enjoy today. Master Kim also published a book of pansori lyrics and scores, and established his own sori-teaching system to guide his students, one of whom is the late Master Oh Jung-sook. Her fame and gratitude to her mentor earned Kim even wider admiration from ordinary people as well as fellow musicians. The relationship between Kim and Oh still stands as a fine example of a mentor-mentee relationship. Let’s end this episode of Sounds of Korea with some parts from Heungbo-ga performed by pansori master Kim Yeon-su.

Some Parts from Heungbo-ga / Sori Kim Yeon-su