고수관이 부른 노래는 판소리인가

Abstract

Despite a great deal of research that has been conducted on the origin of pansori, its beginning has not yet been determined. Furthermore, the theory that was generally accepted in academic circles, that the lyrics sung by pansori singers were transferred into writing to become prose fiction, has proven to be problematic in many ways. Much of what is known about pansori before the twentieth century is based on information found in Jeong Nosik’s work Joseon Changgeuksa(History of Joseon Classical Opera). It would be difficult, however, to regard the text as a reliable source on the nature of pre-twentieth century pansori, as its content is an organized compendium of stories related by pansori singers of the 1930s. Go SooGwan was a master singer who was born in 1760 and died in the second half of the 1840s, but all that is known of his life comes from a few poems composed by Shin Wi. Despite Go’s status as a master singer, almost nothing is known about how he performed his songs. A manuscript of Chunhyang Jeon (Story of Chunhyang) that preserved at the Donam Library of Yeongnam University, a variant of the rental book version of the work, not only contains many Seoul songs that is not found in any other variants of the work but it also features several appearances by Go SooGwan. The type of songs sung by Go in the story does not appear to be pansori as we know it today. So what kind of songs did Go SooGwan sing and how did he sing them? To answer those questions, we need a great deal more knowledge about pansori than we possess today. It is apparent that scholars of pansori have shown little interest in pursuing the question when the word ‘pansori’ first came into usage and what it signified. We cannot define it in the ordinary way as a combination of pan (block) and sori (sound). That characterization significance provides no insight in particular to what pansori was at its beginning. In this essay, I analyze every example of the word’s appearance in entertainment articles of Maeil Shinbo (Daily News) from 1912 to 1915, to determine how exactly it was used at the time. The newspaper articles reveal that while male singers like Yi Dongbaek and Kim Changhwan sang exclusively in pansori, female singers sang in kyunggy sori and Seodo sori as well as pansori. The articles also reveal that pansori at the time could be performed in a variety of episodes, not just in twelve or five episodes as they are today. Through this research, I consider the idea that pansori began as the singing performance of important passages from prose fiction, as the analysis of Maeil Shinbo articles on pansori raises the possibility that the word pan (printing block) is a reference to printed works of fiction.