Songs for “Great Leaders”: North Korean Music

Have you ever worn a backpack?” North Korean refugees tell me that this is code for asking if a friend within North Korea has any BTS songs. K-pop is banned in the isolated country, and young people found with recordings have in recent years faced imprisonment and even death by firing squad. North Korea is a violent state. A professional violinist, a North Korean refugee now living in Britain, was thrown out of a national arts troupe and forced to work in a mine for three decades. “I slept on rice straw, just like a pig.” The reason: his father had once been a Christian church elder. Britain, perhaps surprisingly, is home to a large North Korean refugee community. Its members keep low profiles, wary lest North Korean agents find them or punish family members back home. In the last few years, I have found myself working with refugees, to add nuance to my knowledge of North Korea and its music.

Korea was where the Cold War turned hot, but Koreans had no say in the division of their land into two separate states. That division was decided by two US State Department officials who, in 1945, put a line on a map at the 38th Parallel. Until this point, Korea was a Japanese colony. The division was to allow both the Soviets and the Americans to take the Japanese surrender on the Asian mainland – the Soviets above and the Americans below the line. Throughout its existence, North Korea has see-sawed between the Soviet Union and China, influenced by both. In 1949, to create a generation of proletarian musicians, promising students began to be sent to the Soviet Union for study. In 1971, when Sea of Blood was created as the first ‘revolutionary opera,’ it looked to what are known as the ‘model works’ (revolutionary productions) promoted during China’s Cultural Revolution, but copied the storyline of a novel by the Russian Soviet Maxim Gorky. Traditional instruments were reformed to make them compatible with Western equivalents, much as had happened in Soviet satellite states under Stalin and in China during the Republican Period.

Folk songs were collected, lyrics changed to match the socialist ideology, and melodies simplified. And, after 1967, as the personality cult around Kim Il Sung as The Eternal Leader was enforced, a “literary art theory” was imposed, measuring all artistic production in reference to the incorporation of ideological “seeds” and sidelining aesthetics and creativity. All books and journals from before 1967 have disappeared from Pyongyang libraries.

How can one study North Korean music and dance? All materials published within North Korea require authorisation and all recordings and broadcasts are state-controlled. Internet uploads are curated, and when a few tourists were allowed in before COVID-19, they saw (and filmed) only what the regime wanted to show. Although I have been privileged to visit Pyongyang twice, I have always been aware that those I meet know what can and cannot be said. They are, of course, as intelligent and as immensely skilled as musicians and artists anywhere else in the world, but the regime in North Korea is far more dangerous for them than for me. While most foreigners arrive as tourists, I received official invites, once because the avant-garde Korean composer Isang Yun sponsored me, and once as Britain established diplomatic relations. I was able to visit schools and universities, and to interview academics, musicians and artists. Still, all my meetings had to be agreed with the appropriate authority in advance. My ‘guides’ never left my side, and everything I did was monitored (North Korean hotel rooms have microphones and cameras behind the mirrors, in the walls and in the TV). When I arrived the second time, the car I was travelling in took a wrong turn on the way from the airport to the hotel in Pyongyang, and we were forcibly stopped at gunpoint. In the hotel that evening, my ‘guides’ produced a very unsubtle reminder that I should be careful: a folder containing press cuttings about my work, transcriptions of BBC interviews and photos of me lecturing at SOAS University of London.

North Korea can be a dangerous place to visit – remember Otto Warmbier? The Australian scholar Alek Sigley, now a PhD student at Stanford, was charged with espionage when studying legitimately in Pyongyang in 2019. And the state likes to have kompromat on everybody, so when, some years ago, Nigerian diplomats visited my office at SOAS to offer me 18th-century paintings that had been spirited out of a Pyongyang museum collection, I quickly suspected a rat. It took me many years to slot into place the pieces of the jigsaw I relate in my latest book, Songs for “Great Leaders”: Ideology & Creativity in North Korean Music & Dance. I visited libraries in Europe, North America and Asia, and met North Koreans in Siberia, Washington, Seoul and London. Now that I have published the book, I am told I should never risk going back to North Korea.

+ Keith Howard’s Songs for “Great Leaders” is published by Oxford University Press