[태그:] 세종대왕

As a young king, he tuned twelve notes and wrote music that is still played today. Late in life, he made letters to write down the words.

1. One stone was a little too high

In 1427, a court musician named Pak Yeon (1378–1458) brought a new instrument to Gyeongbokgung, the main palace in Seoul. It was a pyeongyeong: sixteen L-shaped stones hanging in a wooden frame, each one cut to ring a single, exact note. Until then Korea had used chimes from China, and many of them were out of tune. Pak Yeon had found good stone in Korea and cut a new set at home.

King Sejong listened and was pleased. He was thirty years old.

“The Chinese chimes are not well tuned, but these are. Finding the stone was lucky, and the sound is clear and beautiful. But the stone for Ichik sounds a little high. Why is that?”

Ichik is the ninth of the twelve notes. Pak Yeon checked that stone and found that part of the ink line he had drawn for cutting was still on it. The stone had not been ground down all the way. He ground off the rest of the line, and the note came right.

Sixteen years later, in 1443, the same king finished a new alphabet: Hunminjeongeum, “the correct sounds for teaching the people” – the letters we now call Hangul. Most people know Sejong only for that. But the alphabet came late in his life. When he was young, the sounds he cared about were the sounds of music, and the order of his life tells a story:

• 1418 – Sejong becomes king at 21.
• 1419 – A Chinese book on tuning, Yullyeo Sinseo, arrives in Korea. Sejong studies it with his scholars.
• 1420s – Pak Yeon tries again and again to make the Hwangjong pipe, the pipe of the first note. In 1427 he shows the king his new stone chimes.
• 1430 – A correct Hwangjong pipe is made. From it come all twelve notes – six yang and six yin – and the court’s chimes and bells are tuned to them.
• The years after – Sejong invents a new score, jeongganbo, and composes court music and dances: the music still played at Jongmyo Shrine.
• 1443 – Now 46, Sejong finishes a new alphabet for the sounds of Korean speech.
• 1445–1446 – The first long work in the new letters, a song cycle, is written and set to music, and the alphabet is announced to the country.
• 1450 – Sejong dies at 52.

2. Twelve notes, twelve months

East Asian music divides an octave into twelve notes, just like the twelve keys from C to B on a piano. Together they are called the 12 yul-ryeo (律呂). Six of them are yul, the yang notes, and six are ryeo, the yin notes. They take turns: the odd-numbered notes are yang and the even-numbered notes are yin. Europe found the same twelve notes, but never split them this way. In East Asian thought, odd numbers are yang and even numbers are yin, and music followed the same rule.

But these notes were never only music. Each one also belonged to a month and to one of the twelve earthly branches – the same twelve signs used for the animals of the zodiac, the two-hour blocks of the day and the directions of the compass. The first note, Hwangjong (黃鐘, “yellow bell”), belongs to 子, the month of the winter solstice. The old books say that this is when yang energy wakes up again, deep under the frozen ground. The seventh note, Yubin, belongs to 午 and the summer solstice. Going once around the octave is like going once around the year.

Remember this detail, because it is the key clue of this whole story: the first note, Hwangjong, is 子. Every other note is counted from it, the way every month is counted from the winter solstice. Whoever has the Hwangjong pipe has the starting point of the whole octave.

3. Find one pipe, and you have them all

How do you get twelve notes in tune? You start with one bamboo pipe, the Hwangjong pipe, and you make the others from it. Cut one third off its length, and the shorter pipe sounds a fifth higher. Add one third to that new pipe, and it sounds a fourth lower. Keep going – take away a third, add a third – and after eleven steps you have all twelve pipes. The method is called sambun-sonik (三分損益), “thirds taken away and added.” In ancient Greece, Pythagoras built a scale in almost the same way. The video below shows the Hwangjong pipe and the whole method step by step. It is in Korean without English subtitles, but the pipes, the lengths and the sounds speak for themselves.

So everything depends on the first pipe. And that pipe was more than a musical tool. Its length set the country’s standard unit of length, the grain it could hold set the standard measure of volume, and the weight of that grain set the standard weight. When a new dynasty began, getting the Hwangjong pipe right meant getting the whole country’s measurements right.

Joseon was still a young kingdom, founded in 1392. Sejong asked Pak Yeon to make the pipe, and it was not easy. The pipe was supposed to hold exactly 1,200 grains of millet, but Korean millet was not the same size as the millet in the Chinese books, so Pak Yeon even shaped grains out of wax to get the size right. His first tries failed. In 1430 a correct pipe was finally made, and the stone chimes (pyeongyeong) and the bronze bells (pyeonjong) of the court orchestra were tuned to it.

4. A music book in the king’s classroom

Sejong became king in 1418, at the age of twenty-one. The very next year, his half-brother Prince Gyeongnyeong came back from Ming China with a huge set of books, the Great Compendium of Neo-Confucianism (性理大全). Inside it was a short book called Yullyeo Sinseo (律呂新書), “A New Book on the Pitch Pipes,” written in Song China around 1187 by Cai Yuanding, a friend of the philosopher Zhu Xi. It explained, step by step, how to make the twelve pipes from the first one.

Sejong did not leave this book to the musicians. Joseon kings held regular study sessions called gyeongyeon (經筵), where the king and his scholars read the classics together and talked about how to govern. Sejong had the Yullyeo Sinseo read and discussed there. For a Confucian king, this made sense. Music was a model of order: when every note is in its right place, the sound is in harmony, and a good state should work the same way.

5. The king’s own music

Tuning instruments was only the start. Sejong also needed a way to write music down, so he made one. Jeongganbo (井間譜) is a score drawn as a grid of boxes, like squared paper read from top to bottom. One box is one beat. A note that fills two boxes lasts two beats. It was the first notation in East Asia that showed exactly how long each note lasts. The Veritable Records of King Sejong, the official history of his reign, ends with twelve whole volumes of these scores (volumes 136 to 147).

Then he wrote the music to fill them. His two great suites are Botaepyeong (保太平, “Keeping the Great Peace”), which praises the learning and wise rule of the earlier kings, and Jeongdaeeop (定大業, “Founding the Great Work”), which praises their victories in war. Sejong built them on native Korean melodies instead of Chinese court music, and he wanted them played for his ancestors. The court was too conservative to allow that while he was alive. In 1464, his son King Sejo finally made them the music of the royal ancestral rites, saying that the ancestors should hear the music they had heard in life.

They are still played. Every year, at Jongmyo Shrine in Seoul, an orchestra of bells, stones, drums, flutes and strings performs Botaepyeong and Jeongdaeeop – eleven pieces each – while dancers move in a square of rows. For Botaepyeong they perform the civil dance, holding a flute and a feathered stick; for Jeongdaeeop they perform the military dance, holding wooden swords and spears. UNESCO lists the Jongmyo rite and its music as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.

Sejong also set Hangul itself to music. Yongbieocheonga, the “Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven” (1445), was the first long work ever written in the new letters. It tells the story of the kings who founded Joseon. Sejong turned it into a court piece with dance called Bongnaeui (鳳來儀, “The Phoenix Comes”), and made it in three versions:

Version	Words	Length	Feel
Yeominnak (與民樂, “Joy Shared with the People”)	Classical Chinese	long	slow and grand, long breaths
Chihwapyeong (致和平)	Hangul	medium	medium
Chwipunghyeong (醉豐亨)	Hangul	short	fast, the boxes packed with words and notes

The book behind this site counts these works the way Sejong counted notes. Yullyeo Sinseo starts from one base note and fills the octave with twelve. In the same way, Bongnaeui – named for the phoenix, with words about dragons, the symbols of the king – stands as the “Hwangjong” of Sejong’s music, and with it the set becomes twelve, just as the scores fill twelve volumes. And the three versions of one song follow the three powers, Heaven, Earth and Human.

6. Letters hiding in the score

There are many old books printed in Hangul, but the Chwipunghyeong score is special. It is not printed in a stiff book type. The words are written with a brush, squeezed into the boxes beside the notes, so reading it feels like reading a letter from Sejong himself. You can even see small details of how he wrote: the vowel ㅢ is not joined into one shape as in modern fonts, but written as two separate strokes, ㅡ and ㅣ, side by side.

Now look at the marks Korean musicians use today in jeongganbo for two instruments: the haegeum, a two-string fiddle, and the janggu, an hourglass-shaped drum.

The fiddle’s two bow strokes are ㅣ and ㅡ. The drum’s marks are ㅇ, ㅣ and ㆍ. Am I seeing things? These marks were set in the 20th century, mostly by the music scholar Kim Ki-su (1917–1986), so Sejong did not design them. But that is what makes them interesting: when musicians needed simple marks for kinds of sound, they reached for the same shapes Sejong had used for letters.

The two bow strokes are more than two directions. On a haegeum, ㅣ is the pull (the bow moves from left to right) and ㅡ is the push (from right to left), and they do not sound the same. The book gives each one a character. (The author does not play the haegeum, so he worked out this table with the help of an AI assistant.)

	ㅣ pull (left → right)	ㅡ push (right → left)
Sound	focused, with a clear center	softer, spreading out
Start of the note	sharp and clear	a little late and gentle
Good for	accents and rhythm	long breaths and flowing melody
Feels like	clear, like speech	smooth, like singing
Direction	酉 – west, metal, dry, separating	卯 – east, wood, moist, clinging
Corner shape	⌎ = ᅟᆜ (ㅣ then ㅡ) → [ɨ]	⌏ = ㅢ (ㅡ then ㅣ) → [ɰi]

The pulled ㅣ belongs to 酉, the west, and the pushed ㅡ to 卯, the east. This may look odd if you know that in the letters ㅣ stands for the east, but on a haegeum the bow always moves sideways, never up and down. Here ㅣ is only the score’s mark for a pull, not a picture of the stroke, so it is no surprise that its sound has the character of 酉. The last row puts the two strokes together, and the order matters. ㅣ first and then ㅡ makes the corner ⌎ – which is the old Hangul vowel ᅟᆜ, sounding [ɨ]. ㅡ first and then ㅣ makes the corner ⌏ – which is ㅢ, sounding [ɰi]. Same two strokes, opposite order, different sound. Keep this in mind when you look again at the brush-written ㅢ in Chwipunghyeong, where its two strokes are kept apart.

The drum is the best clue. A janggu is a hollow body with a round head on each side – a pair of ㅇs. The body does not make sound by itself. It takes the sound of the strike and spreads it out, wider and softer, like the soundboard of a piano. The strike itself is the dot, ㆍ. Read Hangul with this in mind. ㅇ is written next to a vowel when no other consonant comes first, as in 아아아 for aaa, where English simply writes the vowels. In this book’s reading, ㅇ is not an empty placeholder but Hangul’s soundboard: it does not ring on its own, but it lets the vowel ring out.

7. A pavilion built like a calendar

Inside Gyeongbokgung there is a large square pond, and in the pond stands a wide two-story pavilion: Gyeonghoeru (慶會樓), “the Pavilion of Happy Meetings.” The king held banquets there for his officials and for foreign envoys. It was rebuilt on a much larger scale in 1412 by Sejong’s father, King Taejong, and the work was led by the builder Pak Ja-cheong. The wooden building burned in 1592, during the Japanese invasions, and the pavilion you can visit today was rebuilt in 1867.

At first sight it is just a big, beautiful hall. But count its parts, and it turns into a picture of the universe.

• The hall is 7 bays long and 5 bays wide, resting on 48 stone pillars.
• In the very center are 3 bays: Heaven, Earth and Human (天地人), the three basic powers of the world.
• Around them stand 8 pillars, for the 8 trigrams of the Book of Changes – the same signs you can see on the corners of the Korean flag.
• Around those are 12 bays, one for each month of the year.
• The outside of the building rests on 24 pillars, one for each of the 24 solar terms, the points that divide the farmer’s year into two-week steps.
• Around the 12 month-bays hang doors, 4 on each of the 16 sides: 64 doors, for the 64 hexagrams of the Book of Changes.
• Even the shape of the pillars follows an old saying, “heaven is round, earth is square” (天圓地方). Where the stone pillars stand on the ground they are square; higher up, holding the hall toward the sky, they turn round. The pond around the building is square too.

The twelve months even follow the directions. On the east side are the three months of spring (寅卯辰), on the south side the three months of summer (巳午未), and on the west side the three months of autumn (申酉戌). Walking around the upper floor is like walking through the year.

8. The scholars next door

Right in front of Gyeonghoeru stands a long, low hall called Sujeongjeon (修政殿). In Sejong’s time, this was the site of Jiphyeonjeon (集賢殿), the “Hall of Worthies” – the king’s research institute, where young scholars studied old books, wrote new ones and advised the king.

Scholars from this hall, such as Jeong In-ji, Seong Sam-mun and Sin Suk-ju, wrote the Hunminjeongeum Haerye in 1446, the manual that explains the new letters. That manual explains Hangul with exactly the ideas built into the pavilion: yin and yang, the five elements, the seasons, and Heaven, Earth and Human. The three basic vowels are even drawn from them: ㆍ, a round dot, is Heaven; ㅡ, a flat line, is Earth; ㅣ, a standing line, is a Human.

So picture their workday. They read the Yullyeo Sinseo with the king, they heard the newly tuned bells and stones at palace ceremonies, and every day they looked out at a building made of months, seasons and the three powers. It would be strange if none of this had gone into the letters.

The letters had a practical reason too. In 1429 Sejong published Nongsa Jikseol, “Plain Words on Farming,” a guide built from the know-how of Korea’s own best farmers, because the Chinese farming books did not fit Korean soil and weather. It was printed and sent to villages and officials. But it was written in Chinese characters, so most of the farmers it was meant for could not read it.

9. Color and pitch

Here is the idea of the book behind this site. Think of the letters the way Sejong thought of music. The consonants are like the timbre of instruments – the color of a sound – and they come in five groups, for the five places in the mouth and the five elements. (You can see those five colors on the 3D model in the last post.) The vowels are like pitch, and pitch, for Sejong, meant the 12 yul-ryeo: six yang and six yin.

But there is a problem. Hunminjeongeum has 17 consonants and only 11 vowels. Some of those vowels are also made by saying two vowels in a row: ㅛ (yo) is ㅣ (i) followed by ㅗ (o). No musical scale makes a new basic note by playing two notes one after the other. So the 11 vowels in the manual look like a selection – the vowels heard most often in Korean – taken from a larger, more regular set of twelve.

And remember the pipe. Give someone the Hwangjong pipe, and they can work out the other eleven notes. 17 + 11 = 28. What if one of the 17 consonants was really the starting pipe for the vowels? Then the alphabet would be 16 consonants and 12 vowels – and the vowels would be a full octave.

The book’s answer is ㆆ. Go back to the clue: Hwangjong is 子. 子 is the time of the winter solstice, in December – the shortest day of the year, when the sun sinks lowest. Among Sejong’s consonants, the consonant of winter is ㆆ, a throat sound that belongs to water. Now look at its shape: a flat line, and under it a circle. It is the sun after it has gone down below the horizon. That is why, in this book’s vowel compass, ㆆ stands at 子, in the place of Hwangjong. Opposite it, at 午 and the summer solstice, stands ㆍ, the round sun high at noon. ㆆ and ㆍ make the north–south line of the compass, and ㅣ and ㅡ make the east–west line.

So here is the whole story in one breath. As a young king, Sejong wanted the notes of his court to be exactly right. He had Pak Yeon make one perfect pipe, Hwangjong. From that one note, thirds taken away and added gave him twelve – six yang yul and six yin ryeo. On those twelve notes he tuned the stones and bells, drew a new kind of score, and composed music that is still played at Jongmyo today. And near the end of his life he did one more thing: he gave his people letters that write down the sounds of their own speech – letters that could hold the words of a song as exactly as his score held its notes. The man who tuned a kingdom ended by tuning its alphabet.

10. Read more

This post is a short English version of ideas from the book 《正音으로 듣고쓰다》 (Listening and Writing with Jeongeum), pages 127–135 and 264–267. The Korean originals go further:

• I. 12율려 (陽律陰呂在位圖說) – the twelve notes and the vowels
• 경회루 48개 기둥과 천지인·24절기 – the 48 pillars of Gyeonghoeru
• 井間譜(script) – posts on jeongganbo

https://hun-min.com/?p=1897