Four or Five Strings: Musicians in Korean and Chinese TV
The universal language starts with Confucius and shamans. Here's what that reveals about our favorite characters.
By the time you read this, the final two episodes of Lovely Runner will probably be out in the world. I did not expect to fall so hard for this show, about a fangirl whose k-pop bias dies suddenly. In her grief, she finds herself thrown back in time, into her high school self, only to learn that her favorite singer was not only her classmate — he was her neighbor. As our heroine tries desperately to save his life in the future, she and we come to learn what a truly decent, sweet and determined guy her crush is.
It’s a phenomenal fantasy (your idol has been in love with you this whole time!), and the entire cast is outrageously charming. Head and shoulders about the rest, though (quite literally), has been the breakout performance by Byeon Woo-seok as the injured swim champion turned triple-threat frontman Ryu Sun-jae. We’re all obsessed with him.
Though I’ve been musical my whole life, I’ve never been serious about it. I enjoy performing, and the mental quiet of a flow state during practice. Theory is beyond me; not even the circle of fifths can stick in my head. Yet I’ve taken classes or lessons for piano, oboe, bassoon, voice, ukulele, accordion and banjo since childhood. I’m fascinated by devotees who Get Music on a level far beyond me, by fans who are encyclopedic about Their Band, by critics who translate the experience of sound into words.1
I always sit up a little more when a character onscreen makes music.
千悲万恨四五弦，弦中甲马声骈阗。
[She pours out] a thousand sorrows and ten thousand regrets on [her instrument’s] four or five strings,
And on these strings [she produces] the sound of armored horses riding two abreast.
Anonymous Tang dynasty poet (618–906 CE), “Pipa”
Music makes the people come together, yeah
The oldest playable instruments in the world are 9,000-year-old crane-bone flutes found in Henan. (You can listen to them here!) Thanks to some late third-century BCE book-burning, our written records of music theory, composition and philosophy in China only pick up in numbers during the Tang dynasty, eight centuries later. That doesn’t stop Confucius (551–479 BCE) from laying the foundations of music’s role in Chinese society and cultures around it for millennia to come.
“The Chinese regarded music as an image of the universe,” writes scholar Mary T. Guerrant, “and since all things were one in their view, it was assumed that music was also the image of the laws of heaven.” Musician Li Kai told NPR that, officially, “music’s highest function was as a tool of moral education and socialization. It taught people to respect authority and hierarchy, and to cultivate a spirit of composure and moderation.” Chinese Confucians of the Tang era considered harmony “strength through unity, not diversity. The idea of harmony as a combination of different chords and notes was a foreign notion.”
Through studying the mathematics and theory of music, scholars and gentlemen could refine themselves and thereby play a part in refining the family and the nation. If music reflects the true nature of the world, in action, it may be a primal force in the universe. This stems from Taoist conceptions of the origin of music; there, humans derived scales, pitch, tone and harmony from listening closely to the natural world. In xianxia dramas, music becomes a direct means of manipulating the physical and the spiritual. Characters in The Untamed, for example, use music to communicate with the dead, command the resentful energy of souls in torment, treat qi-related illness, fend off brawling enemies and commit murder.
Outside of fantasy, historical Confucians respected music for its power. Folk songs, writes Harvard’s Dr. Xiaofei Tian, “are considered precious [to the emperor] as the voices of the commoners but are also dangerous, for they may beguile the ruler with their plain language of mood and desire.” Furthermore, in a society in which music was deeply regulated and tied to official state rites, “[m]oralists cannot control what one hears in a song; it moves its listeners and has the power to carry them away.” This is what necessitates discipline and study, per the philosopher Xunzi: “Man must have his joy, and joy must have its expression, but if that expression is not guided by the principles of the Way, then it will inevitably become disordered.”
Music, mix the bourgeoisie and the rebel
Korean musicologists take pains to prove and pride in demonstrating that the sound of gugak has always remained independent from Chinese influence. The Korean peninsula is, of course, far smaller than China, whose diversity in folk traditions alone is staggering. However, elite culture in Korea had high levels of exchange with China as far back as the fifth century; noble, wealthy and royal Koreans also applied Confucian principles to modes like court and ritual music.
Yet the instruments, melodies, rhythms and actual sounds of Korean musical traditions were almost entirely localized. To hear the difference in style, listen to this guqin piece from the Song dynasty (960–1279 CE) and this geomungo performance. These instruments are both of a family of large zithers, both ancient in form and both the province of scholars and nobles for personal cultivation. The percussive drive of Korea’s geomungo stems not only the wooden plectrum that strikes the silk strings but, very likely, from Korean music’s roots in an indigenous tradition of shamanism. For some direct illustration (and one of my absolute favorite musical scenes in any drama), check out this brief scene from Lovers of the Red Sky, in which the male lead recalls his role as a child sacrifice for a rain ceremony:2
Both cdramas and kdramas show us that music plays a part in every stratum of society, and not just those regulated by top-down Confucian patriarchy. Tree With Deep Roots won me over early with its lively depiction of working songs. Courtesans entertain their guests with highly skilled instrumentation (often while spying on them). Traveling performers, gangs of gamboling kids, opera stars, teahouse storytellers, farmers asking their fields to grow, wedding ceremonies, court dancers, unruly country girls joining high society — the breadth and width of sonic expression in these shows is rich, rich, rich.
Hey Mr. DJ, put a record on
There is a tension in historical dramas, that nobles who play for themselves are high-class, while professional performers are lowly, if selectively valuable to the wealthy. In contemporary shows, of course, that condition is virtually flipped: there’s nothing more desirable than a pop star, and nothing more romantic than a guy, any guy, who suddenly reveals that he plays an instrument.
Dig into the biography of nearly any c-ent or kdrama actor at random and you’ll probably find musical talent. Many grew up learning instruments, just as many also learned dance from a young age. More commercially, the idol trainee–to-actor pipeline is almost a cliche, with stars like Xiao Zhan, Rowoon, Victoria Song and Kim Ji-won all starting in boy bands and girl groups before transitioning to acting. Lovely Runner riffs on this, as the other members of Ryu Sun-jae’s band resent him for his drift toward movies. It’s also not uncommon for actors to perform at fanmeets and concerts, individually or in groups; it is less common to reverse-engineer a group from the cast of a drama, but T.U.B.S. (The Untamed Boys) sure did it, sort of.3
No one can generalize about these cohorts whether or how much they pursued music for the joy of it versus to slake the global culture of overachievement that seems especially harrowing in Asian countries’ self-narratives. Their storytellers have plenty to say about it, though. Thirty but Seventeen is a sweet, heartfelt kdrama about a teenage violin player who wakes up after more than a decade in a coma. Once she’s relearned how to walk and be independent, she’s determined to recover her technical ability and make music her entire world again. As the show progresses, she runs up against her limits for the demands of the professional music sphere. We’re as invested in whether she can maintain her love for the violin as her burgeoning romance with the male lead.
“Man had no control over time and space, substance and power, but sound he created himself, and it was a reflection of what was in his heart,” Guerrant writes of Confucian thought. “Music could either strengthen or weaken the equilibrium of the world and was thus accepted as a serious responsibility.” The philosopher Mencius notes that one cannot help but respond to sounds, which implies that human agency cannot bar Heaven’s will that music will stir its audience. The people who make music in both period and modern dramas are acting on the world with their art, for personal expression, for community-building, for breaking open order. We may not see them using magic, but they’re doing something very close. ✶
Who is your favorite music-maker in c-ent or kdramas? Let me know in the comments or on Bluesky. I love recs and growing my teetering to-watch list.
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Truly a side note, but one of my favorite short pieces of profile journalism is about Selena Gomez and patron saints.
The actor Ahn Hyo-seop grew up playing violin and piano, and if you want to watch him being delightfully bratty (but ultimately committed) about learning geomungo for this role, enjoy.
There is a five-episode variety show starring these guys and the wider Untamed ensemble that I would watch for hundreds of hours if I could. They are so chaotic and so ridiculous and having such a good time! Yet again, Americans are cowards about promotions.
Furthermore, if you would like to see a man’s brain entirely break in real time, watch prodigious talent (truly) Liu Haikuan melt down as he tries to play The Untamed’s theme song on a singing calculator.