s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

…is infectious. Especially when it comes in the form of four adorable young Korean samulnori drummers. (Samulnori being the Korean equivalent of taiko.) I spent my lunch hour in Civic Square, with the sun (!) on my back and the drumbeats reverberating in my sternum. Woo ! I love watching people have fun — what a blast ! And that goes for the crowd as much as the drummers: we all clapped along, shouting on cue and joining in singing Arirang* (lyrics kindly provided for those of us non-Koreans in the audience). Too bad my lunch hour was up and I had to go — after the post-drumming tightrope act, they started up a massive Civic Square Korean conga line, just as I was leaving.

*Notes for the folklore geeks among us: If you can dredge up any kind of musical mental association for “Korean folk song” — John Barnes Chance’s “Variations on a Korean Folk Song” counts — then you’ve probably heard Arirang. Or an Arirang, as there are apparently myriad regional and personal variations of it. No one knows where the melody originated, or what the word “arirang” actually means. (I suspect it’s a vocable, like the fiddle-diddle-di-dohs of English folk songs. But maybe it was once a personal name ?) The “traditional” ones have verses longing for one’s absent lover, but there are personal and political ones, too, especially about how much it sucked to be annexed by Japan. It’s a beautiful melody.