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Thursday, December 20, 2007       Free Headline Alerts

N.Y. Philharmonic to perform for an ultra elite North Korean audience

SEOUL — The New York Philharmonic orchestra announced last week that it would perform in Pyongyang on Feb. 26. North Korean watchers here said only selected elites including North Koreans being groomed for diplomatic and espionage roles would be allowed to attend.

N. Korean Ambassador to the United Nations Pak Gil Yon, right, and New York Philharmonic President Zarin Mehta speak to reporters at Avery Fisher Hall in New York, on Dec. 11.       Reuters/Mike Segar
Word of the exchange came as mind-boggling news to most North Koreans, who since early childhood have been conditioned to view the United States as their worst enemy.

“We were taught that the United States is a ‘100 years enemy,’" said Kim Yong-Soo, a North Korean defector in his mid 40s who works in Seoul's prosperous film industry. "It means revenge on America should be sought for a hundred years before any attempt is made for reconciliation. Things have really changed.”

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Defectors from the North here say all international cultural events must have Kim Jong-Il’s approval and only select members of the privileged elites will be in the audience.

Kim Young-Hee, who studied ballet at Pyongyang Music and Ballet School, said: “Classical music is only for the selected talents in North Korea. The general public has no access to it at all. There are no shops selling classical records or CDs there.”

North Korea experts say, however, that North Korea knows how to use classical music for propaganda purposes. The concert would be the reciprocal gesture for the North Korean Taekwondo team’s demonstration tour in Los Angeles on Oct. 7 in accordance with a new cultural exchange program set up between the two countries.

“Old people must remember that Pyongyang radio in the 1960s and 1970s used beautiful classical music in its radio programs targeting South Koreans,” said a researcher at Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU). “After all, Russia had Tchaikovsky, not America, and North Korea learned from them how to penetrate the masses with music.”

He pointed out that copyright is a foreign idea in North Korea, and classical CDs are commonly copied and circulated. As North Korea is exposed to the outside world, government workers on international assignment are taught classical music as a means of cultivating diplomatic contacts and advocating socialism, he said.

Mozart, Beethoven, Dvorak, Schubert, Tchaikovsky and Bach are included in the basic cultural training, he said.

“As such, it is being confirmed from various contacts that the audience to fill the New York Philharmonic concert are being processed by the top security agency of Kim Jong-Il,” he said.



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