Introduction
Through musical commune, ancient Koreans, in labor and leisure, sought peace and harmony with their fellow human beings and nature. The surviving folk songs and story-singings inform us of the hopes and despairs of working class Koreans seeking unity through music. With music as the means of invocation they communicated with the spirits residing in the netherworld. Despite the massive Westernization in Korea's tumultuous modern history, some musical heritages have survived as reminders of the poetic, musical, narrative, and spiritual ways of "traditional" Korea.
Geography of Korea
Korean music is an acoustic reflection Korea's historical, geographical, and ethnic identity. Korean language, a branch of the Turkic-Ural Altaic-Tungusic language, reflects Koreans' ethnic, ritualistic, and musical kinship with Manchurian, Mongolian, and Siberian peoples as a result of shared migration from the Central Asian mountain ranges. Currently, Korea is confined to the Korean Peninsula that stretches in a vertical span of 1,100 kilometers totaling 222,154 square kilometers or 85,500 square miles in northeastern Asia, neighboring with China across the Amnok (Yalu) river, with Russia across the Tuman (Tumen) river, and with Japan across the East Sea (Sea of Japan).
The Korean peninsula is surrounded by sea on three sides with numerous inlets dotted with over 3,000 islands. About seventy percent of the land is mountainous, and approximately forty-five is arable. With the Taebaek Mountain Range as a backbone, the land rapidly drops to the East Sea, and the rivers flow southwest to the West Sea (Yellow Sea) or to the South Sea. Blessed with numerous scenic mountains, waterfalls, rocky shores, sandy beaches, islands, and rivers that meander through the valleys and the plains, Koreans prize their land as "the embroidered and brocaded rivers and mountains" (Kûmsu kangsan). The geographic beauty marked by each season's turning instilled in the ancient Koreans a profoundly poetic and meditative outlook that regards human life as part of nature. Various communal festivals and prayers for good harvest were observed in conjunction with the agricultural calendrical cycle, and the twelve-beat chungmori, one of the most representative rhythmic patterns of Korean music, with the greatest accent on the ninth beat, is symbolic of the twelve lunar months with celebrations of harvest in the ninth.
Trot (Teuroteu) is the oldest type of Korean pop music originating during Japanese rule in the first half of the 20th century.
