민중, 문화운동, 개신교: 동월교회의 ‘한국적’예배와 한국찬송가 창안시도

Abstract

This paper examines ‘Koreanized’ worship services and hanguk chansongga (Lit. “Koreanhymns,” hymns in Korean traditional music style) that had been used in Dongwol Church during the 1970s and 1980s. Dongwol Church, a representative minjung church of the 1970s and 1980s, was established in 1976 by Rev. HEO Byeongseop (1941-2012) in Wolgokdong, a slum area on the out skirts of northern Seoul at that time. The church was well-known for the progressive works of Rev. Heo, whose religious creed was based on minjung theology, a Koreanized theology that sees the people or the masses as the main agent of history and, further, considers the people itself as God. Rev. Heo’s search for Koreanized church music was influenced by the minjung cultural movement of the 1970s and 1980s, which utilized Korean traditional performing arts, such as talchum (masked dance) and pansori (one person narrative singing), as the main cultural tools in conveying its ideology. As Rev. Heo himself was familiar with traditional performing arts—he learned talchum, for instance—he tried various ways of utilizing Korean traditional music in the worship service. He used pansori for sermons, tried a pungmul (farmers’ band music) style service and gut (shaman ritual) style service, and sang the Korean hymns. However, most of these attempts were not successful because they required professional performing skill. Among these, only singing of the Korean hymns had been continually practiced for more than ten years. In 1979, Rev. Heo and YI Seongjae, who aspired to make hymns in Korean traditional musical style at that time and later became the music director of the church, saw the possibility of creating practical and usable Korean hymns, while Yi found an opportunity to create Korean hymns and put them into actual use in worship. Yi decided to compose hymns in jeongga (vocal music of aristocrats) style, because Yi had many years of training in that style of music, and he believed that jeongga would be proper as church music since the musical form of Western hymns is also more similar to Western art music than to popular music. Yi composed over forty hymns in jeongga style and taught the hymns to church members throughout the 1980s. According to the weekly bulletin of the church, in the worship service of Oct. 21, 1984, Korean hymns were sung throughout the entire service for the first time. This might have been the first Christian worship in contemporary Korean society that was ever performed with entirely Koreanized church music. After that appearance, there were occasional instances of applying Korean hymns for complete worship services for about two years. From Dec. 14, 1986, the order of Sunday worship in its bulletin began to show numbering for the Korean hymns, which means that the church had a sufficient Korean hymn repertoire to organize them with ordinal numbers. They used a bundled leaf music for about nine years, and in 1995, the church published a hymnbook entitled Hanguk Chansongga (Korean Hymns), which is believed to be the first hymnbook entirely consisting of hymns composed in Korean traditional music style notated with jeongganbo (a Korean mensural notation). The church also issued a cassette tape, Korean Hymns Composed in Traditional Gagok Style, which contains twenty hymns in the 1980s. The values and influence of Dongwol Church—not only as the first Protestant church to use Koreanized church music in ordinary worship services, and the first church to publish a Koreanized hymnbook, but also as an agent of the minjung cultural movement in the 1970s and 1980s—relative to other minjung churches as well the broader realm of Korean society deserve further attention, and should be studied in more detail.