Nathan Hesselink's book explores a contemporary Korean percussion ensemble, SamulNori, and the genre it has spawned, samul nori. The four musicians of SamulNori, playing two drums and two gongs, gave their first performance in 1978. Today, the genre is singularly popular, and has become the default form of Korea's age-old percussion bands on national and international stages. SamulNori first took to the stage as part of a larger group dedicated to finding new ways of staging folk music, and within four years they had established a set of relatively fixed pieces that today has canonical status. They soon embarked on a punishing schedule of highly visible international tours, and grew a fan base not dissimilar to those of pop stars. By 1987 they had established a collaboration with an Austrian/American jazz group, Red Sun, that lasted a further decade. They developed a pedagogical method, complemented by notations and workbooks....

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