• (The) Research of the performance art and culture
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• no.42
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• pp.321-359
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• 2021

This paper examines the unique features of Korean farmer's music-or nongak-in Hawaii by exploring three nongak groups from different decades beginning in the 1970s. The first community-based nongak group began in the 1970s, with the establishment of the Wahiawa Korean Seniors Club. In the 1980s, there was another group supported by the Kalihi-Palama Immigrant Service Center. And in the 1990s, the Hawaii Korean Farmer's Music Assoiation, which is still active, was founded. I ullustrate the overall changes made by the three nongak groups as follows. First, they show a shift from social groups playing music to a music group doing social activities. Second, from a group of people negotiating their music, through a group led by musical leadership, to a group with a leader who created his own musical leadership. Third, from a music group began out of a pseudo-shaman ritual, through a group purely playing music, to a group adding samulnori and further creating a new rhythmic pattern. These changes occurred because, while the members are all first-generation immigrants, their experience of nongak in the motherland was different because of their age differences. In addition, they emerged because the level of awareness and acceptance of samulnori-which has gained huge popularity in Korea-were different.