풍물과 사물놀이의 교회 수용양상: 진보성과 보수성

Abstract

The Protestant Church in South Korea, which has an approximately 130-year history, has ignored, or even been hostile to Korean traditional music, especially genres rooted in the folk music tradition. For the Korean Protestant church, Western-style music had become the norm, taken as almost “tradition.” Since the 1980s, however, notable changes have occurred in terms of the Koreanization of Protestant church music, with some Christians or traditional musicians who were also Christians actively and continuously attempting to create and perform “new” Christian music applying Korean traditional music genres. Among these, pungmul and samulnori—whose representative instruments are the kkwaenggwari (a small gong), the jing (a large gong), the janggo (an hourglass drum), and the buk (a barrel drum)—became an important part of this new trend, as many churches organized pungmul and samulnori groups on a temporary or permanent basis. However, progressive and conservative church acceptance of these music genres has differed, as the two churches are based on different theologies. For the progressive church, pungmul’s relationship to traditional culture, especially shamanist ritual, is not a subject of controversy, while that very same relationship is the genre’s principal hindrance in the conservative church. Because of these differences, pungmul, incorporating its original meaning, has been accepted by the progressive church, where as the conservative church needed some sort of “cultural buffer” before opening its doors. Samulnori has played just such a role, as it has been considered to be a successful example of the reinvention of traditional culture as a purely musical genre, without shamanist associations. This paper examines the cultural change that enabled the inflow of pungmul and samulnori to the progressive and conservative churches, respectively, and discusses how this cultural change represents the Koreanness of Korean Christians.