Trot () or Ppongjjak () is a genre of Korean popular music, known for its use of repetitive rhythm and vocal inflections. Originating during the Japanese occupation of Korea in the first half of the 20th century, trot was influenced by many genres of Korean, Japanese, American, and European music.
Trot has been around for almost 100 years and its distinct singing style has been continuously evolving. Trot music developed in rhythms during Japanese colonial rule. After the liberation of the Korean peninsula and the Korean War (1950-1953), artists such as Lee Mi-Ja, Choi Sook-ja, Bae Ho, Nam Jin, Na Hun-a, Joo Hyun-mi and many others helped to make trot popular. With the rise of K-pop from the 1990s onwards, trot music lost some popularity and was viewed as more old-fashioned. However, from the 2000s onwards, young trot singers such as Jang Yoon-jeong, Hong Jin-young, K-pop singers such as Super Junior-T, Daesung, MJ and Lizzy, renewed interest in the genre and popularised it among young listeners.
Although the genre originated before the division of the Korean peninsula, it is actually now mainly sung in South Korea; the associated pop culture, together with nursery rhymes, new folk songs in North Korea were categorized as "Enlightenment Period song" (계몽기 가요). It is no longer composed as propaganda music has since displaced other musical forms. Those songs were only orally-recorded. It was intentionally revived during Kim Jung Il administration: in the late 2000s, Korean Central Television aired a TV program that introduced those "Enlightenment songs".
Etymology
The name "trot" is a shortened form of "foxtrot", a style of ballroom dance that influenced the simple two-beat rhythm of trot music. Except two-beat rhythm, trot and foxtrot do not share any other notable characteristics.
Characteristics
Rhythm
thumb|right|simple duple, triple and quadruple metre patterns are common in trot music
The trot is known for being composed in a two-beat rhythm, also known as the duple metre. In its early days, trot music was often composed using the pentatonic scale and minor keys. This pattern is called an anhemitonic scale or anhemitonic pentatonic scale, which was characteristic in Korean 'Gyeonggi-minyo' and other folk music such as early Japanese enka.
The pentatonic scale consists of five degrees: of the natural major scale, the 4th and 7th degrees are omitted, and to form the pentatonic minor scale, all these 5 degrees will descend 3 degrees. Before 1950, the pentatonic minor scale dominated in popularity, however, the pentatonic major scale had started to become more popular. After the Japanese occupation, trot music was composed using the heptatonic scale and major keys. In trot music, lower tones are generally sung with vibrato, while higher tones are sung with the flexing or turning technique called 'kkeokk-ki' (literally means flexing, ).
Kkeokk-ki
The 'Kkeokk-ki' technique may be better explained by the gruppetto ornament of Western classical music theory. A note is figured as if it had been split into two or four subsidiary notes. And the voice is inflected to these imaginary notes: e.g. one quarter note is split into four sixteenth notes: (1) one in original pitch - (2) one in upper pitch - (3) one in lower pitch - (1) one in original pitch again (see below image, the example measure is from Na Hun-a's "물레방아 도는데", "Turning Waterwell"). Kkeokk-ki happens in the transition between two notes in the original pitch. For ordinary listeners, it is not easy to quickly perceive the subtlety of this technique. However, any trot singer can hardly do without the elaborated effect of Kkeokk-ki.
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Lyrics
Most of trot's lyrical content is based on two popular themes, although they vary with the times: 1) love and parting, 2) longing for a sweet home. Some see the origin of this sentimentalism in "colonial tragedy". But that may well be related to the ancient tradition of resentment or deep sorrow () in Korean culture. Elegiac song texts with minor scales are the most common. In addition to the elegiac rhythm and the content of the lyrics, the 'new stream' in the theater (), introduced in the 1910s from Japan, has also contributed to the fact that trot is dominated by the moods of compassion and pain. Because the pieces of this 'new stream' frequently dealt with themes such as the family tragedy, love affairs - the best pieces were "Janghanmong" (), "Cheated in Love, Cried of Money" (); the great hit song "Don't Cry Hongdo" (홍도야 울지 마라) sings just the tragic story of the piece "Cheated in love, Cried of money". So it is understandable that many Koreans tend to be sad or compassionate when they hear trot songs. Sentimental words like 'crying' and 'leaving' have been consistently the most popular. But speech levels, which are recognizable at a sentence's final ending in Korean, have changed with the times; since 1990 the sentence in the low-level of politeness () is often used.
Performance
Trot music is mainly performed by one singer or at most a duet. It is rare for a trot singer to play any instrument while singing. The playing of the instruments has something of an accompaniment function. The song usually being played by an orchestra or a big band as accompaniment. These use mostly backing vocals, usually consisting of 4 female vocalists, but rarely of mixed vocalists. The trot music shows often include a group of dancers. Thus, a typical broadcasting band orchestra for trot consists of instrumentalists, chorus, and dancers. Of course, it is possible for a singer to perform a song accompanied by one or two instruments; e.g. Joo Hyun-mi sings in her YouTube channel, accompanied only by guitar and accordion. Apart from the talent of a singer, the composer plays an important role in the success of a trot song. Since there are few trot singers and songwriters, a trot singer often gets his or her own singing style with the composer who always prepares a song for release with the singer.
Naming
The name trot has been widely used since the 1980s, even though the designation itself dates back to the 1950s. In the 1920s the name yuhaeng-changga () was in use; this name comes from the fact that yuhaeng means "trend, fashion, popular", and all sorts of western music, e.g. hymn, nursery rhyme, folksong, etc., as well as Japanese enka, which were introduced to the Korean people at the end of the 19th century, were called changga; popular music in the western style was called yuhaeng-changga, later abbreviated yuhaengga ().
The trot is sometimes referred to as seongin-gayo (), which means "music for
adults". Trot also has a newer name, jeontong-gayo (), literally "traditional popular song". Calling trot jeontong-gayo may implicitly refer to national self-confidence and give people a sense of self-esteem, so that the uncomfortable suspicion of foreign origin would be eased. The name daejung-gayo (), or "music for the public", has been used historically for trot, but it is a wider term for all sorts of popular music, so K-pop for example, also falls under the label of daejung-gayo. Additionally, instead of teuroteu (), the term teurot () is occasionally seen in written Korean.
History
Origin
Trot music originated in Korea during the Japanese occupation of Korea. It is believed that trot's closest ancestors were Japanese enka. There is an investigation showing that the songs that were published in Korea and Japan between 1945 and 1950 used in both countries pretty much the same amount of duple metre rhythm in a minor scale. Some suggest that trot could have been influenced by Korean folk music, which does have some resemblance to trot's vocal inflections, even if Korean traditional music's rhythmic structure differs from trot's fixed duple metre. It was true that a genre of Sin-minyo (new folk song, ) was in circulation in the 1930s; but this music was simply modified versions of traditional folk songs e.g. Arirang or 'Taryeong' songs