Jijijiji jujijuji. Korean gayageum byeongchang: History, performance, and libretti

Rooted in the author's twelve plus years studying and performing the Korean musical form, gayageum byeongchang, this dissertation, as the first formal study of the genre, seeks to explain its artistic features, uncover its origins, clarify its relationship to other genres, and analyze the long-term effects of redactors of its texts. The dissertation also includes three hundred pages of original translations of libretti from the author's performance repertoire.; There is little written history available on gayageum byeongchang in English or Korean, and most of what there is resides in the memories of the carriers of the tradition, including the author's teachers. Beyond oral accounts, information about both the social and linguistic history of byeongchang must be gleaned from research on the activities of its major players in other related genres---primarily pansori and changgeuk. The first half of the dissertation locates gayageum byeongchang among these other genres, speculates on when and how it emerged as a distinct form, and reviews the textual influences on pansori that resulted in the libretti sung today by gayageum byeongchang 's students and performers. Drawing on her own experiences studying and performing gayageum byeongchang, the author considers to what degree pansori's major redactors, responding to shifting cultural, political and technological developments, ultimately affected the libretti that is sung today.; In reviewing the history of the pansori texts, the dissertation focuses primarily on the contributions of the nineteenth century petty bureaucrat and pansori aficionado, Shin Jaehyo, concluding that while singers learned Shin's new sinicized versions and traded them among themselves in order to raise their social status and gain upper class patronage, they did so primarily orally, which left room for misunderstandings by those who did not have a classical Chinese education. The songs performed today thus feature a mixture of what might have been a Korean oral formulaic tradition mixed with a Sino-Korean/Chinese classical literary formulaic tradition, all of which are now memorized for performance.; The final three hundred pages of the dissertation feature translations of selections from the author's gayageum byeongchang repertoire, featuring songs from two pansori narratives and several short dan-ga.