무악 동해무속사물

East Asian folk music is an umbrella term for the traditional, community-rooted musics of China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, and related cultures in the region. While the practices themselves are ancient, the category coalesced in the 1900s as folklorists, broadcasters, and state ensembles began documenting, standardizing, and reviving rural and ritual repertoires. Typical features include pentatonic-based melodies, flexible rhythm and meter, and heterophonic textures in which multiple performers ornament the same tune simultaneously. Vocal styles range from narrative epics and work songs to lyrical art-folk ballads, often delivered with regional timbres and rich ornamentation. Signature instruments include the Chinese erhu, pipa, dizi, and guzheng; the Japanese shamisen, shakuhachi, and koto; the Korean gayageum, haegeum, piri, and janggu; and Mongolian morin khuur and tovshuur, alongside various frame drums and gongs. Beyond village and ritual contexts, East Asian folk music today thrives on stage and in media, influencing popular genres and fusions that retain traditional scales, storytelling, and timbral aesthetics.

Muak is the traditional Korean shamanic music performed within gut (ritual) ceremonies to invite, appease, and send off deities and ancestral spirits. It is an ecstatic, participatory music that combines chant, dance, and instrumental ensemble performance to induce trance states for the shaman (mudang) and the community. The sound world centers on piercing double-reed oboes (taepyeongso/hojok), bamboo and reed flutes (daegeum and piri), two-string fiddle (haegeum), zither (gayageum), and a powerful percussion battery—small hand gong (kkwaenggwari), large hanging gong (jing), hourglass drum (janggu), and barrel drum (buk). Melodies move in modal frameworks such as ujo and gyemyonjo, while rhythm unfolds through cyclic changdan patterns like gutgeori, jajinmori, and semachi. Vocal delivery is declamatory and improvised, often recounting mythic narratives (e.g., bonpuri on Jeju) and blessing formulae.

East Asian music is an umbrella term for the traditional art, court, ritual, and folk musics of China, Japan, Korea, and neighboring cultures. While locally diverse, these traditions share broad aesthetic features such as pentatonic and heptatonic modal systems, heterophonic textures, flexible rhythm organized in cycles, and a refined focus on timbre, ornamentation, and silence. Typical instruments include Chinese zithers (qin/guqin, zheng/guzheng), lutes (pipa, ruan), fiddles (erhu), flutes (dizi, xiao) and mouth organs (sheng); Japanese mouth organ (shō), double-reed (hichiriki), transverse flute (ryuteki), lutes (biwa), and koto; and Korean zither family (gayageum, geomungo), fiddle (haegeum), transverse flute (daegeum), and oboe (piri). Court forms such as gagaku (Japan), yayue (China), and aak (Korea) exemplify ceremonial grandeur, while folk and theatrical genres emphasize narrative singing, dance, and regional languages and dialects. Across these cultures, music is deeply linked with philosophy and ritual—Confucian ideas of moral cultivation, Buddhist liturgy and chant, and indigenous concepts like Japan’s ma (meaningful silence) and jo–ha–kyū (formal pacing) shape both composition and performance.