The janggu

Korea's hourglass drum — palm on the left head, stick on the right, jangdan cycles

Related

The tablaThe mridangamBangu (Peking-opera drum)

The janggu is Korea's hourglass-shaped double-headed drum: a narrow waist, two wide ends, a palm on the left and a bamboo stick on the right. The name already gives away half the technique — jang is the stick. One drum holds two sets of sounds, and the jangdan cycle organises them into a loop.

The main line: one drum, two voices

The left head (gungpyeon) has a larger chamber and thicker hide, low and dark; the right (chaepyeon) is smaller and thinner, high and bright, usually tuned a fourth or fifth apart. The left palm strikes the left head, the right hand strikes the right with a bamboo stick; a pressed left palm bends the bass further down. One holds the floor, the other speaks.

Form: hourglass, ropes, two hides

The body is hollowed from one block or built from staves, narrow at the waist and wide at the two chambers. The hides are sewn into iron rings, the rings are hooked to ropes, and leather tabs on the ropes slide left or right to change tension. The narrow waist separates the two resonating chambers, so the low left and the bright right do not eat each other. Hide choice changes with period, region and genre: the left usually takes thick cowhide or horsehide, the right a thinner horsehide, doghide or deerskin; the fifteenth-century treatise Akhak gwebeom records horsehide on both faces.

Technique: palm left, stick right

In court and chamber music the drum sits on a stand, with the left palm and the right bamboo stick; in farmers' music and dance it hangs in front of the body, the player moving with the beat. The right stick (chae) is long and slim with a slightly larger tip, and the stroke turns at the wrist; the left palm has single, ornamental and stopped strokes. The difficulty is not speed but making two hands sound like two people: the left asks, the right answers.

Jangdan: putting breath into a cycle

The rhythmic patterns are jangdan: each cycle has a fixed number of beats and accents, among them jinyangjo, jungmori, jajinmori and hwimori. In farmers' music the jangdan leads the procession; in pansori the drummer uses it to hold the singer's breath; in court music it is slow and steady. In 1978 Kim Duk-soo and others brought the four farmers' percussion instruments to the stage, and samulnori carried the janggu from the field into the concert hall; later Nanta turned it into a theatre prop. The drummer is not a timekeeper but the one who decides the breathing.

Against the tabla and the mridangam

The tabla is a pair, the right drum tuned and the left making the bass; the mridangam is one barrel with two heads, the right tuned to Sa and the left weighted low; the janggu is one hourglass with two heads, left palm and right stick. All three give the low and the high to two hands, but divide them differently: the tabla across two drums, the mridangam across two ends of one drum, the janggu across a hand and a stick.

Three things to take away

1. An hourglass with two heads: low left, high right, two voices in one drum. 2. Palm and stick: jang means stick, and the hands have separate jobs. 3. Jangdan is a cycle: the janggu's skill is putting breath into a beat.

HS classification

The two heads are tuned to different pitches: the left, with a larger chamber and thicker hide, is low and dark; the right, smaller and thinner, is high and bright, usually a fourth or fifth apart. A palm pressed on the left head bends it lower. The band is a schematic span for a common setup (D2–C4, common G2–G3), not a measurement of any one drum.

Sources

• 杖鼓的沙漏形胴、两面异皮、绳与皮套调音、左手掌与右鼓槌的奏法，参 Wikipedia "Janggu" 与 Grove "Changgo"；《乐学轨范》所记两面用生马皮与后世左厚右薄的差异并录；本文为原创表述
• 农乐、盘索里、宫廷正乐与散调中的长短用法，参 Grove "Changgo" 与国立国乐院教材；曲库无杖鼓录音，实例取 C1 韩国旋律作参照；本文为原创表述

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.