The purpose of this study is to describe the transmission process of p'ansori, a form of Korean dramatic musical storytelling. Since p'ansori has been handed down by word of mouth, it has undergone various changes and variations. The socio-historical context surrounding p'ansori since its birth in the eighteenth century has had a great influence on the transformations of p'ansori over three hundred years. P'ansori performers, trained in a tradition of apprenticeship, have recreated and varied their materials, as well as continued what was transmitted to them in a particular school or master's singing style, known as che/je. These constant complex interactions between change, as flexible variation and individual creation, and stability, as sameness, have produced the p'ansori of today.