#11 - "Song of General Kim Il Sung". 1946

A Story of the Song...Story behind the Song by Keith Howard

A group of elderly Bulgarians burst into song, twelve minutes into the documentary film Kim Il Sung’s Children (directed by Deog Young Kim, 2020). One, soon joined by others, sing “Song of General Kim Il Sung/Kim Ilsŏng changgun ŭi norae 김일성장군의노래”. Seventy years before, this had been sung by children from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) who they had befriended soon after the outbreak of the Korean War. Back in 1950, the northern state had put children onto trains and sent them to safety in friendly European socialist states. At the time, the elderly Bulgarians had been children, and they remembered North Korea’s children singing the song as they disembarked the train. Residents of Seoul who endured two invasions by North Koreans during the early part of the war, also remember this same song sung, endlessly, by North Korean troops. In June 1992, struggling and out-of-breath as I climbed Myohyang Mountain in North Korea, I was overtaken by a group of young pioneers marching while singing the same song, the lyrics for which had been helpfully chiselled into the rocks. I asked my guide why the beauty of the scenery needed to be scarred by song texts. “To inspire us,” came the response.

General Kim Il Sung

“General Kim” was written in June 1946 to celebrate the first anniversary of Korea’s liberation from colonialism after Japan’s surrender at the end of the Pacific War. Ri Ch’an (리찬, 1910–1974) wrote the lyrics and Kim Wŏn’gyun (김원균, 1917–2002) composed the music. Nine months earlier, three months after Japan’s surrender, Kim Il Sung had returned to Pyongyang. According to reports, he was wearing a Soviet uniform when he gave his first speech. But factionalism was rife, and in 1946 he lacked majority support. It would be two more years before the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was proclaimed a separate state. Some consider the first North Korean film, “My Hometown/Nae kohyang 내 고향”, through its portrayal of Kim Il Sung’s early life, kick-started the revision of history that ever since has had it that liberation in 1945 came because of Kim’s great leadership and successful guerrilla offensives. But “My Hometown”, written by Kim Sŏnggu (김성구) and directed by Kang Hongshil (강홍실), was produced in 1949; “General Kim” kick-started the revisionism a full three years earlier. Ri Ch’an’s lyrics polished Kim Il Sung’s credentials. They referenced his guerrilla activities against the Japanese colonialists, mentioning Manchuria, the Amnok River, blizzards in the mountains, and suffering.

A year later, in 1947, perhaps as a reward for composing “General Kim”, Kim Wŏn’gyun set lyrics by Pak Seyŏng (박세영) and composed the “Patriotic Song/Aegukka 애국가”. Even though the latter is North Korea’s official national anthem, played at sporting and diplomatic events, it is the former song that remains central in North Korea. So, when the New York Philharmonic visited Pyongyang in 2008, they played “General Kim” rather than “Patriotic Song”. And, as a North Korean refugee recently told me:

As soon as you are born you must learn “General Kim”. It functions much in the way national anthems do in other countries … We never used to sing “Patriotic Song” much, and after the Arduous March [the famine of the 1990s] began, we didn’t sing it at all. At special events, it would be played at the beginning and end, but everywhere else we sang “General Kim”.

The music of “General Kim” follows a style that will be familiar to anybody brought up in a socialist state. In its musical simplicity it is not dissimilar to Chinese and Soviet mass songs (geming guqu/massovaya persnya), although it also evokes a type of school song popularized in Japan from the 1880s and in Korea throughout the colonial period (Japanese shōka, Korean ch’angga 창가). It is a four-square march, frequently using dotted rhythms that are ideal for strident percussion and brass band arrangements. It features clearly articulated functional harmony framed in a ternary structure built from paired two-bar phrases. Listen here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N_2qjqZJMA;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTnCQYMnu7E;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rLhzBfqZvY

Kim Wŏn’gyun claimed to be a self-trained composer. He told me that he studied art at school but struggled to find work in the art or design world. However, political expediency makes his biography hard to tie down with any precision. Some biographies state he didn’t complete high school, or that after high school he went to Japan to study. When his father died in 1939, he took over responsibility for the family business, which may have comprised both a shop and a farm. In 1946, the year when he composed “General Kim”, he joined what was then known as the Pyongyang Musicians Union (P’yŏngyangshi ŭmakka tongmaeng 평양시 음악학 동맹). He was one of the first to benefit from North Korea’s promotion of proletarian musicians – a practice adopted from the Soviet Union that championed the training of tthose from working class families. There is, though, an anomaly here, because he grew up in a land-owning, bourgeois-leaning family: training as an artist was not at the time something open to those born into families that constantly struggled to put food on the table. In 1952, after North Korea signed a cultural exchange agreement with the Soviet Union, he was sent to Moscow to study. He followed the curriculum created by the so-called “Brigade of the Historical Cathedral of the Moscow Conservatoire”, and his graduation piece was a symphonic tone poem, “Birthplace/Hyangt’o 향토.” He completed “Birthplace” in May 1957, and it was broadcast in Pyongyang in March 1958.

When he returned to Pyongyang from Moscow, North Korean ideology was shifting – following Kim Il Sung’s so-called “Juche Speech” of December 1955 – to a narrowly conceived nationalism. The shift became more entrenched as North Korea reacted to the Sino-Soviet split that followed the death of Stalin. Kim Wŏn’gyun quickly realised the danger of allying himself to anything Soviet, and he became the spokesman for the new ideology as it came to be applied to music. He wrote critical articles in the journal Korean Music (Chosŏn ŭmak 조선 음악), and concentrated on composing songs: in 1992, he told me he had written at least 500 songs. Awards and high-level appointments peppered his career. He was appointed a people’s artist (inmin paeu 인민배우), and in 1972 received the top state award, the Kim Il Sung Prize. In 1977, he was appointed to manage the collective of opera composers at the Sea of Blood Company (P’i pada kagŭktan 피바다 가극단). When he died, he was buried in the Mount Taesŏng Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery (Taesŏngsan hyŏngmyŏng ryŏlsarŭng 대성산 혁명 렬사릉) and the Pyongyang’s music conservatory was – as per Soviet practice – renamed after him: it is today known as the Kim Wŏn’gyun University of Music (Kim Wŏn’gyun myŏngch’ing ŭmak chonghap taehak 김원균명칭 음악 종합대학).

Keith Howard ©, please do not reproduce without prior permission.