Songs for "great Leaders"

Ideology and Creativity in North Korean Music and Dance
Erscheinungsjahr 2020
ISBN: 978-0-19-007751-8
Verlag: OXFORD UNIV PR

Buch, Englisch, 360 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 705 g

Famously reclusive and secretive, North Korea can be seen as a theatre that projects itself through music and performance. The first book-length account of North Korean music and dance in any language other than Korean, Songs for "Great Leaders" pulls back the curtain on this theatre for the first time.

Renowned ethnomusicologist Keith Howard moves from the first songs written in the northern part of the divided Korean peninsula in 1946 to the performances in February 2018 by a North Korean troupe visiting South Korea for the Pyeongchang Winter Olympic Games. Through an exceptionally wide range of sources and a perspective of deep cultural competence, Howard explores old revolutionary songs and new pop songs, developments of Korean instruments, the creation of revolutionary operas, and mass spectacles, as well as dance and dance notation, and composers and compositions. The result is a nuanced and detailed account of how song, together with other music and dance production, forms the soundtrack to the theater of daily life, embedding messages that tell the official history, the exploits of leaders, and the socialist utopia yet-to-come. Based on fieldwork, interviews, and resources in private and public archives and libraries in North Korea, South Korea, China, North America and Europe, Songs for "Great Leaders" opens up the North Korean regime in a way never before attempted or possible.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Howard, Keith

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein
• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Musikwissenschaft Allgemein Musiktheorie, Musikästhetik, Kompositionslehre
• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Geschichte der Musik Nichtwestliche Musik
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Asiatische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Introduction

- 1 Songs for the Great Leader

- Songs, for the people and of the people

- Songs, and song composers

- Songs, assembled for the concert stage

- Songs to build the state

- Songs, built on the foundations of folksongs

- 2 Instruments of the People

- Kaeryang akki: "improving" Korean instruments

- Soviet and/or Chinese influence?

- North Korean particularity

- The chang saenap

- Winds of change

- The "hand wind zither"

- 3 Pulling at Harp Strings

- Discarding the old?

- Retaining the national zither, kayagum

- Creating string instruments, from old to new

- Discarding and creating lutes and dulcimers

- Drums of persuasion

- A new harp, or zither, or both?

- 4 Opera for the Revolution

- Preface: juche ideology

- Introducing revolutionary operas

- "Sea of Blood"

- "A True Daughter of the Party"

- "The Flower Girl"

- "Oh! Tell the Forest" and "The Song of Mount Kumgang"

- 5 Contextualizing Revolutionary Operas

- Are revolutionary operas revolutionary?

- Guided by the leaders

- Before revolutionary opera

- Beyond revolutionary opera

- 6 What Revolutionary Operas Do

- Revolutionary operas as song operas

- Song constructions

- Portable songs

- Operas as ideology, and opera as spectacle

- 7 From Spectacles to Dance

- Watching the 50,000

- Spectacles, calisthenics, gymnastics

- Notating dances, prescribing spectacles

- Chamo p'yogibop

- A pan-Korean notation?

- Ch'oe Sunghui and the development of dance in North Korea

- North Korean dance, an overview

- 8 Composing the Nation

- Learning to compose

- Songs, as foundations

- Upscaling songs.

-. Back to symphonies

- Yun Isang, from South to North

- 9 Songs for New Leaders

- Authorized pop

- Pop as state telegraph

- Footsteps of the general

- Onward towards the "final victory"

- Rolands and Yamahas

- Epilogue

- References

- Index

Über Autor(innen)

Keith Howard is Professor Emeritus at SOAS, University of London, and Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow. From 2017 to 2018 he was Kent R. Mullikin Fellow at the National Humanities Center, North Carolina, and before that he served as Professor and Head of Department at SOAS, and Professor and Associate Dean at Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney. He has held visiting professorships at Monash University, Ewha Women's University, and Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, was editorial chair for the SOAS Musicology Series (Ashgate/Routledge) for nine years (2008-2017), and founded and managed the SOASIS CD and DVD series as well as OpenAir Radio.