Abstract: This study contributes to understanding diaspora and its music cultures by examining the Korean genre of p'ungmul as a particular site of continuous and dynamic cultural socio-political exchange between the homeland and the host society. As practiced in Los Angeles and New York City, this genre of percussion music and dance is shaped by Korean cultural politics, intellectual ideologies and institutions as p'ungmul practitioners in the United States seek performance aesthetics that fit into new performance contexts. This project first describes these contexts by tracing the history of Korean emigration to the United States and identifying the characteristics of immigrant communities in Los Angeles and New York City. While the p'ungmul troupes developed by Korean political refugees, who arrived during the 1980s, show the influence of the minjung cultural movement in Korea, cultural politics of the Korean government also played an important role in stimulating Korean American performers to learn traditional Korean performing arts by sending troupes to the United States. The dissertation then analyzes the various methods by which p'ungmul is transmitted in the United States, including the different methods of teaching and learning p'ungmul---writing verbalizations of instrumental sounds on paper, score, CD/DVD, and audio/video files found on the internet---and the cognitive consequences of those methods. The ways in which immigrants teach and learn p'ungmul have brought standardization to performance practices and enabled Korean American p'ungmul practitioners to learn performance styles currently popular in Korea. This project shows the culture of p'ungmul in the United States to be highly flexible, as Korean American performers utilize different performance instrumentation, repertoire, and aesthetics depending on different audiences, performance venues, aims, and performance contexts. Depending on where they are performing or for whom, they alternate between highly virtuosic and dramatic performance techniques and attempts to re-arrange traditional existing repertoires. In tracing the common performance practices and instrumentation found in different p'ungmul groups in the United States, this project ultimately reveals how different conceptualizations of p'ungmul according to different age groups and across professionals and amateurs affect performance practices and aesthetics.