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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 for the first time on this famously reclusive and secretive regime.
List of contents
- 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
About the author
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.
Summary
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 for the first time on this famously reclusive and secretive regime.
Additional text
a book which will cause all close readers to think about music and its role in society.
