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Tag Archives: Dulsori classes

Dulsori evening class # 5: the performance

22-Jul-06
If anything was going to go wrong, it was going to be the Hwimori. The others were easy: at most four lines, each one the same length, and played once before moving on to the next; and the cycle was repeated several times so that there was no way you were going to forget it. The Hwimori had 31 lines, of different lengths, played any number of times between one and 8 before moving on to the next one. That's a lot more to remember. We were wobbling by line 4 and completely lost by line 9. With some vigorous conducting and shouting by the professionals we somehow came back together by line 13, and from then on we ...
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Dulsori evening class # 4

21-Jul-06
I can touch my toes for the first time in ages. Such is the effect of sitting on the floor crouching over a drum for three hours solid, four days on the trot. Things were going swimmingly yesterday. We had all done our homework. We were remembering everything, doing the breathing, and actually laughing and enjoying ourselves rather than concentrating furiously on getting it right. So the instructors decided to make things more interesting. Let's cut the samulnori hwimori, they said, and go straight from the obangjin to the third line of the drum-only hwimori, make a quick change to that line, and, hey, didn't we tell you, there's a whole new page we haven't taught you yet. We set to it, ...
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Dulsori evening class # 3

20-Jul-06
Mainly consolidation yesterday. Lots of breathing (back-rolling) and reminders of the previous couple of evenings. We were struggling with the heat, and recognising this after a couple of recaps of the ground already covered we played some Korean games. This involved running around, making lots of noise, holding hands and making moves straight out of a ceilidh. I'm sure it would make for a good psychotherapy session, and it was a nice in theory to have a break and do a bit of bonding. But in the soaring temperatures - the warmest July day since records began - hands were slippery with moisture. Fortunately we were all equally perspiring, so no-one felt guilty, but lots of close bodily contact was ...
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Dulsori evening class # 2

19-Jul-06
Yesterday evening we learnt the backhand. And, in retrospect, as I struggled last night to notate what we learned, we also did triplets. We were without the interpreter yesterday, so 95% of the class was conducted in Korean. Some of the Korean students took pity on us non-Koreans (we had a new joiner, another Brit, who had chosen to go to the SamulNori gig at the Purcell Room on the Monday and who thought it rather excellent) and tried a bit of translation. So when the instructor demonstrated a massive rallentando in the coda to the Hwimori changdan, several times, and expounded at great length, I imagine, on the subtleties of this slowing down, one of the students helpfully said, "get ...
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Dulsori evening class #1

17-Jul-06
I ache. My brain aches from concentrating too much (maybe I should relax and go with the flow, but that only happens when at least three pints of London Pride have gone down my neck). The insides of my legs ache: in order to play the changgo you need to be at least a black belt in the lotus position. Ridiculously, my left arm aches. It's not as if the stick weighed anything: it's just that you end up moving the arm more than you usually do in daily life. And my back aches through the strange "breathing" we were asked to do, which involves performing strange circular motions with your shoulders and solar plexus, while in said seated position. Most ...
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