Composing the Nation

In North Korea, with songs fundamental to ideology and central to cultural production, composers face challenges. How can large-scale pieces for instrumental ensembles and orchestras be composed? This chapter begins by discussing how composition activity developed in North Korea, initially with Japanese and then Soviet influence. It considers key early compositions that are no longer acceptable for performance in North Korea. It then shows how early, Japanese-colonial-era popular song structures were upscaled to create symphonic poems, and, from these, how combining the songs and interpretations of the dramatic action of revolutionary operas allowed these to be upscaled into symphonic works. The focus then shifts to the avant-garde composer Isang Yun (1917–1995), who was the best-known Korean composer of the twentieth century in international circles. Yun, after being forced to return to South Korea from Germany and being tried for sedition, was latterly celebrated in North Korea, and his story became the subject of four feature-length films made in Pyongyang. The chapter analyzes three of his most political works to explain why, despite his celebrity, his musical style was never fully acceptable to North Korea, and how he failed to fully embrace the socialist realism frame that North Korean ideology required.