Cao Ly A U Hi Nh Sa Ch

Working With Goryeo-Era Court Music: What Actually Happens When You Try to Recreate It

I spent about eighteen months trying to get a faithful reconstruction of Goryeo-period court music working in a small ensemble. The documentation is fragmented, the instruments are largely reconstructed from fragments, and the notation systems don't translate cleanly to modern practice. This is the guide I wish I had before starting. This is the Vietnamese transliteration of , which refers to the ceremonial music and dance repertoire preserved from the Goryeo Dynasty (918–1392). It's not a single piece. It's a collection of ritual performances that were adapted and often simplified during the Joseon period, then largely lost or heavily modified. The term specifically references the court ritual music system — (aak) — that was imported and adapted from China, reworked over centuries, and eventually standardized in ways that don't always match the original Goryeo practice. Here's the thing most beginners miss: is not Korean folk music. It's highly sinicized court ritual music. The repertoire was deliberately modeled on Tang dynasty ceremonial music, Koreanized over time, and then the Joseon court further reformulated it. What survives today in performances is usually Joseon-era versions, not pure Goryeo originals. If you're looking for authentic Goryeo sound, you need to go back to fragments in sources like the and compare them against later Joseon editions to spot where things changed.

The practical side of working with this material starts with the notation. The traditional Chinese-derived notation systems — and related forms — are logarithmic and relative, not absolute. They tell you intervals and relative positions, not exact pitches in a modern tuning system. I spent weeks trying to map notation to Western scales and kept getting wrong results because the reference pitch kept shifting between sources. The workaround that finally worked was picking a single well-documented source, fixing a reference pitch from it, and sticking with it for the entire reconstruction. I used the Seoul National University ethnomusicology department's transcriptions as my base and accepted that any deviation from those would need justification, not just intuition.

The Instruments You'll Actually Need

For a basic Cao Ly A U Hi Nh Sa Ch reconstruction, you need these core instruments, and no, you can't skip any of them and still call it authentic: Pyeongyeong () — stone chimes. These are the hardest to get right. The tuning is based on ancient Chinese twelve-tone systems, and the stones themselves are rarely available in quality. Most ensembles use metal replicas, which sound sharper and more penetrating than the original stone. If you're doing this for academic purposes, stone is non-negotiable. For performance, bronze or brass will work fine, but know that the timbre difference is significant. Jing () — large bowl gongs. These provide the temporal framework. Each piece has specific gong patterns that mark structural divisions. Get the size right. A 16-inch gong sounds completely different from a 20-inch one in this context, and the Joseon-era specifications point to roughly 18–20 inch bowls for ceremonial use.

Daehyo () — the large double-headed drum. This is your pulse. The playing patterns are not flexible. In Goryeo court music, the hyo patterns are prescribed and changing them is considered a mistake, not an interpretation. I've seen modern ensembles add free rhythm sections and call it "contemporary adaptation." It's not. It's a different genre. Haegeum () and Ajaeng () — bowed strings. The haegeum carries the melodic line in most pieces, while the ajaeng provides harmonic and textural support. Both instruments have sliding techniques () that are essential to the sound. Playing them with fixed intonation destroys the style completely. Piri () — double-reed instrument. This is the lead melodic instrument in many pieces. The piri uses a specific embouchure and breath control that takes years to develop. A beginner playing piri will sound nothing like the intended timbre, and this is probably the biggest bottleneck in any reconstruction effort. Budget at least six months of dedicated practice before the instrument starts sounding remotely correct.

Common Pitfalls That Break Performances

The most common mistake I see is tempo. Goryeo court music is slow. Not "slow jazz" slow. Not "ambient" slow. I'm talking about tempos where a single measure can take eight to twelve seconds. Modern performers who aren't trained in this tradition tend to speed up by 40–60% because their internal metronome is calibrated to different musical traditions. This ruins the ceremonial function of the music. The slowness is intentional — it's designed to accompany ritual movement, and if you speed it up, the dancers can't keep up and the whole structure collapses. Another issue is breath control in the wind instruments. The piri and so () players in particular need to master circular breathing or plan phrases around natural breath points. I watched a group attempt a full ritual cycle once and they ran out of breath three times during the main dance section. The recording is painful to listen to. The solution is either learning circular breathing or restructuring your ensemble to include players who can cover the wind parts in alternation. There's no shortcut around this. Here's a specific edge case I ran into: the (shang mode) pieces. In the original Goryeo system, the shang mode uses a different scale structure than the modern Korean traditional scale. If you play these pieces using modern pentatonic tuning, they will sound wrong to anyone familiar with the tradition. I solved this by cross-referencing three different source manuscripts and building a custom tuning set for the piri and haegeum. It took about two weeks of retuning and testing. The result was noticeably different from standard Korean traditional tuning, and it matched what the old texts describe much more closely.

Where to Find Source Material

The primary source collections are held at several institutions. The National Gugak Center in Seoul has the most complete collection of court music notation and recordings. The Library of Congress also holds some relevant materials in their Asian Division. For Vietnamese-language sources, the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences has published some comparative studies on Goryeo and Vietnamese court music traditions, which can be useful if you're looking at the transmission routes between the two cultures. Online, the Korean Traditional Music Archive (korea.kr/tmusic) has digitized notation for many pieces, though the quality varies. The notation files are particularly hard to read without training. I recommend starting with the modern notation transcriptions and then going back to the original sources once you understand the basic structure. Trying to read original notation first is like learning to drive by reading a manual written in a language you don't speak. For audio references, the early recordings by the National Gugak Center Orchestra from the 1960s and 70s are the closest thing to traditional performance practice available. They're not perfect — the recording technology of the era compresses the dynamic range — but they capture phrasing and timing that modern performances often flatten out.

Limitations You Should Know About

Let me be clear about what this cannot do. Cao Ly A U Hi Nh Sa Ch cannot be fully reconstructed. We don't have complete notation for most of the Goryeo repertoire. We don't have audio recordings from the period. We don't even have complete agreement among scholars about which Joseon-era versions are closest to the originals. Any performance you hear is an interpretation, and a good one will acknowledge that openly. The instrumentation is another limitation. Many of the original instruments are no longer manufactured. The pyeongyeong stones, for example, were made from specific types of rock from particular quarries, and those quarries are either depleted or inaccessible. Modern replacements sound close but not identical. If you're doing this for academic research, this gap matters. If you're performing for an audience that has never heard the original, it may not matter at all. The cost is also a factor. A complete ensemble setup — including proper instruments, tuning equipment, and notation materials — runs anywhere from $8,000 to $25,000 depending on whether you buy new instruments or sourced reproductions. The piri alone, properly made, costs around $400 to $800. A set of pyeongyeong can exceed $3,000. This is not accessible music for casual hobbyists.

If you're approaching this from a purely academic angle, I'd recommend starting with secondary literature before investing in instruments. The scholarly debate about what Goryeo court music actually sounded like is still active, and your reconstruction might be outdated by the time you finish building your ensemble. The work by Park Jae-suk and Kim Hyun-cheol on Goryeo music reconstruction is a good starting point, though even their conclusions have been challenged in recent publications. The most practical path forward is to learn from a qualified instructor if one is available in your area, study the available notation independently, and join an existing ensemble if possible. Solo reconstruction is theoretically possible but extremely difficult, and the results are almost always inferior to collaborative practice. The tradition relies on call-and-response patterns and interlocking rhythms that are nearly impossible to manage alone.