FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
‘Restoring Peace in the Korean Peninsula Through Music’
Dec. 18, 2018 (EIRNS)—“Restoring Peace in the Korean Peninsula Through Music” was the title of a concert and lecture last night at George Washington University in Washington by Korean violinist Won Hyung-Joon, the Music Director of the Lindenbaum Orchestra in Seoul. Won, who has performed as a soloist with orchestras around the world, has spent the last nine years attempting to create a joint North-South Korea orchestra as a cultural contribution to reconciliation between the divided Koreas, but has met roadblocks to nearly every promising opening. Now, as a result of the recent steps toward reconciliation, with summits between Kim Jong-un and both Moon Jae-in and Donald Trump, Won has been appointed as Seoul’s liaison to the North Korean Ministry of Culture. The first cooperative event will take place Dec. 30 in the South, with Won performing with a female vocalist from the North. Efforts toward a joint orchestra are under discussion, with Won hopeful that it can come together over the next year, perhaps for performances in Washington and elsewhere.
Won played short videos of Daniel Barenboim’s joint Israeli-Palestinian orchestra performing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which he said had been a major inspiration to his own effort as a peace activist through music. He also played a clip from the Isaac Stern “Mao to Mozart” documentary, in which Stern asks a young Chinese violinist to sing the musical passage she was playing, and one of the New York Philharmonic performing Arirang during their famous trip to North Korea in 2008. After his studies at Juilliard, Won had continued his studies with the Concertmaster at the New York Philharmonic.
In his lecture and discussion, he described the process of performing in an orchestra in a manner very similar to Lyndon LaRouche’s notion of the “choral principle”—that each individual member must learn to both play beautifully, but also to harmonize and coordinate with all of the other members, and the conductor, in a creative interaction which supersedes differences among the participants, even deep-seated national, cultural or ethnic prejudices or customs. “It’s not a formula,” he said, “where you play music and then there is peace. But it is a process which inspires more profound thinking, which is necessary for peace.”
Interestingly, Won said that Asian music historically did not have orchestras, but was primarily individual players or very small groups. The introduction of classical music from the West thus created an important process of orchestra formation, which has had a major influence on expanding Eastern cultural development.
He also stated that the classical music tradition in North Korea is quite advanced—that promising young musicians had for many years been sent to Russia, Germany and elsewhere in the West to study, and that the people of the North were deeply committed to classical music.
