From Spectacles to Dance

This chapter first explores a large-scale dance spectacle in which 50,000 twenty-something citizens celebrated Kim Il Sung’s birthday in 2000. It then looks at how mass performance spectacles have developed in North Korea, exploring their distinguishing characteristics. Next, a historical and contextual discussion is given (which expands from a brief consideration in the previous chapter), linking to dance, and explaining how the content of mass spectacles are notated and disseminated. This leads to an exploration and explanation of the chamo p’yogibŏp alphabet-based dance notation, developed in Pyongyang and first used in notation scores in the late 1980s. Then, inherited forms of dance (folkloric, indigenous, international), what they became, and the leading dancer Ch’oe Sŭnghŭi (1911–1968) are explored to set up an overview of the characteristics of dance in North Korea. The account foregrounds Ch’oe Sŭnghŭi’s adaptations of modern dance.

Contextualizing Revolutionary Operas

Chapter 5 is the second of three chapters on “revolutionary operas.” It explores how revolutionary operas reflect and are distinct from parallel genres in the Soviet Union, as well as how they may have been influenced by Chinese model works. It shows how ideology, including Soviet socialist realism and North Korean nationalism, and also collective creation and “seed theory,” is embedded in operas. It discusses the involvement of the North Korean leadership, and in particular Kim Jong Il, in opera creation, and explores the impact of comments made by the leadership after the premieres of the first three operas. The chapter asks what was known about opera in Korea before 1945, offering a discussion of the traditional genre of p’ansori, its twentieth-century ch’anggŭk staged equivalent, and how these two genres—and specific musicians associated with them who moved from Seoul to Pyongyang and continued their careers there into the 1960s—fared. These older forms were effectively stopped dead when Kim Il Sung remarked that they were reminiscent of a time when people traveled by donkey and wore horsehair hats, and, after the five revolutionary operas, they were replaced by “people’s operas” in the new, revolutionary opera mold.

Opera for the Revolution

Chapter 4 is the first of three chapters on “revolutionary operas.” Five operas were created between 1971 and 1973. These reflect the state ideology of juche, often translated as “self-reliance,” but linked, in artistic creation, to two control strategies that keep cultural production in check: collective composition and “seed theory.” The operas enhance the cult of Kim Il Sung and were created with the assistance of Kim Jong Il. After a detailed consideration and contextualization of juche (“self reliance”), the operas are introduced. The chapter presents two in detail, “Sea of Blood” and “The Flower Girl,” to explore how lyrics, music, and drama reference historical and social issues known to North Korean audiences to strengthen the orthodox history of the North Korean state, the leadership cult, and the notion of a socialist utopia. It also introduces the three additional operas, “A True Daughter of the Party,” “Oh! Tell, the Forest,” and “Mount Kŭmgang.”

Songs for New Leaders

This chapter first turns the spotlight on how fascist and socialist states approach popular music, both in respect to control and censorship and in attempts to create authorized pop repertories, arguing for a redefinition of “popular.” It then introduces the two North Korean pop bands established in the mid-1980s, Pochonbo and Wangjaesan. Two vignettes explore how pop songs functioned as a “state telegraph” during the 1994–1997 transition period to Kim Jong Il that began with Kim Il Sung’s death, and during 2009–2011 as the third leader, Kim Jong Un, was eased into power, following the death of Kim Jong Il. Featuring Moranbong as the major group, it next discusses the revival in pop culture that began around 2010, finding evidence for this revival stretching back to the beginning of the new millennium. An epilogue briefly considers 2018, when North Korea sent an expanded Samjiyŏn troupe with 130 musicians to the Pyeongchang Winter Olympic Games and South Korea reciprocated, sending K-pop stars to Pyongyang. From 2015, with the second incarnation of Moranbong, and then in 2018 with the Samjiyŏn troupe, the clock was turned back, and songs once again became the primary musical tool of the northern regime, reinforcing ideology, and signaling changes both within North Korea and in North Korea’s relations with the outside world.

Pulling at Harp Strings

Chapter 3 is the second of two chapters that outline and analyze the development of North Korea’s kaeryang akki—updated “improved” or “reformed” versions of traditional musical instruments. It extends the discussion of Chapter 2, critiquing the underlying ideology, which holds that Korean instruments should match Western counterparts, but that Western instruments must be subservient to the Korean soundworld, and introducing key musicians and institutions, and music pedagogy. Data from published resources is matched to the author’s detailed work with key performers in Pyongyang, interviews with musicologists, and evidence gleaned from notations and recordings. It notes how some instruments have disappeared from public view, and asks why this is so. The core of the chapter considers stringed instruments. Some instruments have been developed in multiple versions to match Western orchestral equivalents or to serve specific functions, while new instruments have also been created. The chapter also considers “reformed” percussion instruments.

Instruments of the People

Chapter 2 is the first of two chapters that outline and analyze the development of North Korea’s kaeryang akki—“improved” or “reformed” versions of traditional musical instruments. It identifies formational influences from the Soviet Union, China, and elsewhere. The underlying ideology, which holds that Korean instruments should match Western counterparts, but that Western instruments must be subservient to the Korean soundworld, is critiqued. Key musicians and institutions, and music pedagogy are introduced. Data from published resources is matched to the author’s detailed work with key performers in Pyongyang, interviews with musicologists, and evidence gleaned from notations and recordings. The core of the chapter explores wind instruments, looking in detail at the shawm (chang saenap), flutes (chŏdae, tanso), oboes (p’iri), trumpets and conch shells (ragak, rabal), and the accordion (sŏnp’unggŭm).

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.

Introduction

A good jigsaw takes a devotee many hours to assemble. A complex jigsaw can sit for months before it is completed, and a novice will likely only get part way through before abandoning the puzzle. Still, three quarters of a century after the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (hereafter, North Korea) was founded, few accounts of its art, and fewer still of its music and dance, have seen the light of day. In respect to music and dance, like a jigsaw puzzle just begun, it would be a big ask to expect a single volume to provide a full account, slotting everything into place from the first to last piece. This may seem a defensive position to take in my opening paragraph, but commentators who write about North Korea routinely point out that they are attempting to read tea leaves, as the available data is partial, incomplete, and often contradictory. An archive may hold just one or two of what should be a series of volumes. Some records that ought to be present have disappeared from official accounts. Some composers, singers, groups, and musical activities are forgotten—that is, until someone unexpectedly stumbles on a dusty and previously unknown old text....

What Revolutionary Operas Do

Chapter 6 is the third of three chapters on “revolutionary operas.” It uses musical analysis to establish a theoretical approach. The chapter returns to song, now as the core of revolutionary operas and people’s operas, and shows how key opera songs are designed to be portable. In this sense, songs can be lifted from operas and rearranged for concert use, either as songs in new styles or in instrumental or orchestral versions. The chapter argues that the message, contained in the “seed” (according to “seed theory”), is retained even when lyrics are no longer present, because of familiarity. Operas are shown to move beyond film and cinema (as Lenin’s/Stalin’s favored cultural production) as they make audiences part of the spectacle: the argument links Benjamin’s “panoramas” to Foucault’s “panopticon,” zooming in on musical content to identify topoi forms and themes and Wagnerian melodic leitmotifs, which allow “seeds” to be retained in new works and new arrangements.

Songs for the Great Leader

Chapter 1 explores key songs to establish the formative issues and political ideologies of North Korea, from the beginnings of the creation of official history, through the notion of “popular,” to the 1960s, by which time cultural production was being brought into line with the juche ideology of “self-reliance” and the Ch’ŏllima unitary system of work under the cult of the paramount leader, Kim Il Sung. It looks at Soviet and Chinese influence on song production, and at the legacy of Japanese colonialism, as well as the factionalism that was rife among artists in Pyongyang. The chapter explores how a national identity was established in which folk songs were the foundation, though folk songs were remodeled, removing local particularity but accommodating the lyrical style of professional renditions to create a characteristic vocal style known as the juche voice, and censoring or adjusting lyrics to comply with ideology. Key song composers are introduced, distinguishing “songs of the people” from “songs for the people,” and discussing “revolutionary songs” and “immortal songs.”