Music of North Korea - History

History

North Korean music, like any general Korean music, includes kinds of both folk and classical, courtly music, including genres like sanjo, pansori and nongak. Pansori is long vocal and percussive music played by one singer and one drummer. The lyrics tell one of five different stories, but is individualized by each performer, often with updated jokes and audience participation. Nongak is a rural form of percussion music, typically played by twenty to thirty performers. Sanjo is entirely instrumental that shifts rhythms and melodic modes during the song. Instruments include the changgo drum set against a melodic instrument, such as the gayageum or ajaeng.

North Korean music follows the principles of Juche (self-reliance) ideology. The characteristic marchlike, upbeat music of North Korea is carefully composed, rarely individually performed, and its lyrics and imagery have a clear socialist content. Some religious or original folk music may still exist in North Korea, but reliable sources are absent in the west.

The most common music genre is a type of patriotic song known as taejung kayo,which developed in the 1980s. The songs are generally sung by female performers with accompanying bands or choirs accompanied by a large orchestra (either Western style or a hybrid of western and traditional) or concert band. The composition and performance of all music in North Korea is controlled by the state, and all lyrics are optimistic. Much music is composed for movies, and the works of the Korean composer Isang Yun (1917-1995), who spent much of his life in Germany, are popular in North Korea.

In North Korea, traditional instruments have been adapted in order to allow them to compete with Western instruments. Many older musical forms remain and are used in both traditional performances that have been attuned to the ideas and the way of life of the modern North Korean communist state and to accompany modern songs in praise of Kim ll Sung, his son and successor, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-un from 2012 onward, plus songs that wish for a reunited Korea, thus creating a mix of traditional and Western music that is truly North Korean, a unique variant of Korean music as a whole mixing the old and the new.

The modern Ongnyugeum zithers and the Sohaegeum four stringed fiddle are North Korean modernized versions of traditional Korean musical instruments, both used in traditional and modern musical forms.