Tuesday, February 26, 2008
An odd choice
It's enough to make you sick.
The New York Philharmonic under its music director Lorin Maazel was visiting Pyongyang, North Korea. It would be playing a concert of Wagner, Dvorak and Gershwin.
Since I wasn't around in Nazi days when fine orchestras delighted tyrants, I sat down with anticipation. The concert has provoked considerable nausea. Terry Teachout of the Wall Street Journal and Norman Lebrecht of Bloomberg News have both expressed dismay that an orchestra would entertain the elite of a country that abuses and starves its citizens.
This would be no ordinary concert. A podcast on the orchestra's Web site had promised a live streaming on the public broadcasting channel http://www.thirteen.org and I had verified it the day before.
On this site, Maazel had defended the event: ``Music is a powerful language in which those of us who are humane and intelligent can speak to each other in defiance of political and cultural boundaries,'' he wrote.
It was probably the first time that North Korea's leader had ever been called ``humane'' outside his circle of apparatchiks.
...With an Orwellian figure such as Kim Jong-Il behind the event, it was surprising that things did not run smoothly. The advertised streaming did not take place. Eerily, there was not a word about a change of program on the Web site. At another site http://www.arte.tv , the concert was not available in the U.K. for copyright reasons. After a long scrabble around the Internet, a colleague found the concert at http://www.medici.tv . The sound was choppy and the picture grainy. A large notice which said ``for contractual reasons the concert will be available on Friday February 29'' blocked the center of the screen. There were many visual and aural lapses. Curiously, every time the presenter spoke English, the interference increased and made what he said unintelligible.
"Curious" indeed. The most charitable interpretation of Maazel is that he is engaged in the "all dialogue is progress" form of rationalization, which allows one to justify being manipulated by all sorts of 'orwellian' types.
I'm astonished that someone thought Wagner was a good choice for the program. Not entirely the composer's fault, but his name and work carries more than a little political baggage.
UPDATE: in light of the information in this article, even more strange:
In North Korea, 20th-century modern music among the classical music is forbidden because it is regarded as too liberal." Jazz, too, is barred "because it is seen as 'vicious' music that confuses people's minds. Wagner's music is also restricted because of Nazism; and Rachmaninoff's music is forbidden because he flew to the United States as an exile."
And then there's this lovely story:
Kim Cheol-woong was born in Pyongyang to a politically connected family. His father worked for the party and his mother was a professor. In 1981, at the age of 8, he was selected for a special program for young artists at the Pyongyang Music and Dance Institute. Many North Korean musicians study in Russia, and in 1995, the young pianist was dispatched to the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow.
"The study in Russia changed my life," he says. "I was greatly impressed by the free harmonics in jazz music. I was so shocked when I first heard 'Autumn Leaves' by [French pianist] Richard Clayderman. I had never heard music like that before, and it gave me goose bumps all over my body. I was practicing hard [to learn the piece and] to be able to play it for my girlfriend back in North Korea; but somebody reported the fact to the National Security Agency, and I had to write 10 pages of apology. The fact that the pianist, just because of playing his music, was forced to apologize, caused a great sense of aversion in me, and I decided to seek a freedom of being able to play freely."
5 Comments:
By 
Mystery Meat, at
Tue Feb 26, 12:23:00 PM:
Watch for North Korea to invade Poland in the next few days.
By 
, at
Tue Feb 26, 12:45:00 PM:
By , at
Tue Feb 26, 03:09:00 PM:
Interesting that the young pianist found such 'freedom' in Russia. I guess it is all relative.
I heard someone prattle on about this on one of the networks on the TV, and it is such illusory prattle.
Oh well.
-David
By Unknown, at
Tue Feb 26, 05:52:00 PM:
My favorite was hearing the local NPR affiliate (WNYC - they are tied to the philharmonic) about how they chose the musical pieces. The newsreader explained how the music was chosen to avoid "rabble-rousing" in North Korea.
I couldn't hear any tongue-in-cheek, so I'm assuming if we had video, the announcer was blinking "SOS" in morse code as he explained this Glorious Music.
By , at
Tue Feb 26, 07:48:00 PM:
You don't like it? Write your Assistant Secretary and American diplomat Christopher Hill (nearly a celebrity here in South Korea)who met with members of the orchestra to help push them to do this to open diplomatic ties. Is this orchestra to be what Ping Pong was to China-US relations?
It's frustrating to see how much both the U.S. and South Korea have pussed-out with North Korea over the years. Maybe that will change with Lee Myung Bak as President, maybe not. I'm not sure it could get more pathetic than the situation with former President Roh (guess how many times during his presidency he publicly mentioned the North's human rights crisis).
-dw
