꿩노래 사설 연구

Abstract

The Pheasant Song is a folk song that is found throughout South Korea. This paper does not seek to categorize folk songs conventionally, but rather focuses on classifying types in a unique manner and analyzes their narratives or texts. Accordingly, this paper describes the significance of the handing-down of the pheasant songs, and also summarizes the features that are unique to pheasant songs of Jeju Island. Pheasant Songs can be divided into two types; short-form style and long-form (narrative) style. The short-form style song starts with the calling of the 'male pheasant'. The basic version is about greeting the male pheasant, but the extended version describes the appearance of the male pheasant, the appearance of a hunter; an extended version also includes an element such as a house-building. The narrative style of the song describes pheasants searching for food in the midwinter and finding beans. The female pheasant tries to dissuade the male from eating them but the male persists to eat them and ends up dying. That is, the narrative takes the form of the 'male-female conflict structure'. In addition, in a 'married life' story a daughter-in-law pretends to be a deaf mute in order to cope with the difficulty of fitting in with her in-laws; nevertheless she is banished from her parents-in-law. She sings the Pheasant Song and the misunderstanding is cleared-up through her song. Eventually, she is welcomed back by her in-laws. The short-form pheasant song is frequently sung by children in a dramatic performance. It varies in its types: call and response chanting structure or chorus chanting structure. In contrast, the extended version of the short-form style and the long-form style were mostly enjoyed by adults and were sung as solos. In terms of the process of transmission of the Pheasant Song, it mainly consists of a 'short-form' style and a 'long-form' style. The 'long-form (narrative)' style features the 'male-female conflict' structure and the 'married life' structure, but is considered to have been passed down separately as respective songs. Most research has been carried on the short-form style song, showing that it has widely spread and thus considered to be the oldest. The male-female conflict structure is considered to have first started as Pansori, "Korean genre of musical storytelling," in the late Joseon Dynasty. Later the song evolved into a ballad and novel, and eventually back into its present form as a folk song. It is unknown when and how the story of 'married life' originated, and it is unclear whether the original form is added to a tale, or is originally a song featuring an epic. Thus, it is regarded as the most degraded form. The significance of the succession of pheasant songs firstly reflects reality in the conflict composition of characters, and secondly lies at a crossroads between homogeneous and heterogeneous forms of the song. Thirdly, it is an active exchange between genres of literature as well as types of pheasant songs. There are several features of Pheasant Songs that are unique to Jeju: they are incantatory; an element such as a house-building is included; wordplay is evident; and occasionally short-form and long-form styles are combined together to be sung. Above all, the story about assimilating in-law families to seafood was added as well as the usage of shaman songs, establishing that oral transmission of these features was essential to the creation of the work.