Song of Youth: North Korean Music from Liberation to War

Abstract

IntroductionKim Il Sung claimed expertise in an array of disciplines, but few areas appeared to enliven his intelligence more fully than the musical arts. Music served Kim's statist ambitions from 1945 to 1950, strengthening national consciousness among the first post-colonial generation of North Koreans. Musical techniques pioneered by Christian missionaries would aid in the Kim's cultivation of a corps of North Korean youth steeped, as he said in October 1945, in "people's democracy ... proletarian internationalism [and] hatred for the imperialists."1 North Korean music depicted Korea's imperialistic enemies and concurrently plunged down the taproot of Kim Il Sung's powerful personality cult, feeding the legend of the "great general" with persuasive poetry and attractive melodies. Finally, music promoted the spirit of revolutionary militancy and suffused the Korean War, promoting alliances and ultimately memorializing the conflict as a triumph for the state and its surviving leaders.Christian InfluencesNorth Korea's revolutionary musical techniques did not emerge ex nihilo, but represented a singular amalgamation inclusive of Korean folk tradition, practices of Christian missionaries, legacies of Japanese military government, and Soviet influence. Of these, the importance of Christian and Japanese influences could be considered the greatest external influences on North Korean musical development, not least because the story of the sculptor of North Korea, Kim Il Sung, begins within the church and stands juxtaposed against the crimson backdrop of Japanese imperialism.Kim Il Sung's recognition of music's power to motivate and unify disparate groups was rooted in his youthful experience in a church in Mangyongdae, where he grew of age under the influence of Protestantism. His father, a church rector, and his mother, a Pentecostal deaconess, encouraged him to participate in the musical life of the church as an organist.2 His late-appearing autobiography With the Century explained in part his Christian heritage and youthful love of music, but Kim Il Sung's much earlier Works imply with equal clarity the impact of Kim's experience as a church musician.3 (While the Works remain problematic because of their heavy and multiple editing, they are used here in conjunction with contemporary materials to suggest the broader gesture of North Korean arts policy.)4 Kim's childhood experience as an organist not only solidified his belief in music as good propaganda, it gave him a firm grounding in music theory. The depth of Kim's understanding of music's key relationships (for example, tonality) was wholly apparent when, comparing the keys of D and E major for his son in the 1960s, the elder Kim betrayed a close knowledge of key structure and its emotional impact on singers and listeners. The notion that each key retains the power to provoke certain emotions (including discomfort) originated from European music theorists such as Robert Schumann, and was almost certainly an idea that Kim had picked up at the organist's bench. As Kim Il Sung noted to the attentive Kim Jong-il, E major was more likely to make people "rush forward involuntarily," springing the bodies of singers and audience into alertness and anger.5Kim's published writings from the late 1940s are punctuated with references to music and reveal his related attention to the effectiveness of missionary propaganda. Kim, clearly, recognized that religion's profound influence on Korea stemmed in part from musical techniques that, if harnessed and filled with proletarian class content, could be turned into formidable tools for cultural change. In the uncertain ideological climate after liberation, Kim and his Korean Worker's Party also needed to create an alternative to missionary education. Here they recast foreign models as carriers of proletarian catechism. Kim explicitly modeled his new propaganda centers, termed "democratic publicity halls," on previously established Christian education centers. …