[KS] Prof. Keith Howard adds more on the fate of musicians in North Korea

[Afostercarter at aol.com]

Dear friends and colleagues,
 
Michael Munk's article "The Fate of the Kwaks" at  NKNews,
which I have also circulated on some Korean studies  lists,
has elicited a swift and very interesting response below  from
Keith Howard, who knows a lot about music in North  Korea. 
I have his permission to pass this on, and am glad to do  so.
 
Aidan FC
 
****************
 
 
Thanks for this, Aidan. A list  of some 40 or so Korean musicians who moved 
to the North was published back in  1989 by No Tongûn (in his Han'guk 
minjok ûmak hyôndan'gye). Clearly, it was only  partial, and the Kwak's didn't 
figure in it, most likely because No was reliant  on information he tracked 
down in South Korea. 
 
No also wrote a biography of one of the left wing  composers who moved 
across, Kim Sunnam, in 1992, which  goes into  considerable detail about how his 
life changed – he was first sent to study with  Khachaturian in Moscow, 
then ordered back, purged, sent into internal exile and  forbidden to compose 
for 13 years, and then rehabilitated to teach at PY Music  and Dance 
University as well as be vice-chairman of the Musicians' League until  his death in 
1983. 
 
His story is far from unique, and clearly bourgeois  tendencies amongst 
artists didn't fit with the regime. I have been unable  to track what happened 
to many of the 40 figures listed by No, except for those  who spent the war 
years in Yanji (or who trained musicians from there back in  PY), but rather 
like we discovered with the 1966 World Cup squad, we should not  jump to 
conclusions when such people disappear from public  view. 
 
I guess the most famous supposed 'disappearance' was the  dancer Ch'oe 
Sûnghûi, who is routinely considered (in, for example, the two  major texts 
written about her in Japanese and Korean that have so far been  regarded as the 
authorised texts) to have been executed along with her political  husband in 
1965 or 1966. A muse to Picasso, and associated with many of the  staged 
'folk' dances that have been inherited until today, her disappearance is  
essentially a matter of her name disappearing from programs and dance  
publications at that time. 
 
Last week, however – although this is info that I  haven't yet been able to 
substantiate – I was told that her husband was actually  executed a couple 
of years before her name drops out of programs, which suggests  that she 
died for different reasons, perhaps even from illness.  


Keith




 
 
 
Keith Howard
Professor of Music, SOAS, University of  London; Associate Dean Research, 
Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of  Sydney
_kh at soas.ac.uk_ (mailto:kh at soas.ac.uk) 






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