Since ancient times the Koreans had sung songs reflecting their desires and sentiments and in that course they created and developed national music.
In their national music, folk song is the main component.
The Korean folk song is expressive of the tender, gentle and graceful emotions of the nation by its unique expressing means including mode and tone.
“The folk songs of the northwestern provinces consist in gentle, beautiful and flowing melodies rich in national sentiments and occupy the dominant position in the Korean folk song. Such folk songs as Arirang, Platycodon and Yangsando are widely known around the world as they give their listeners an urge to sing together with the singers and fill them with national dignity and pride,” said Ju Hye Ryon, lecturer at Pyongyang Kim Won Gyun University of Music.
Traditional musical instruments of the Koreans include such stringed instruments as oungum, okryugum, kayagum and haegum, such woodwind as tanso, fife, pipe and saenap and such percussion as janggu, gong and drum.
Vibrato, a style of rendition peculiar to national instruments, adds bright yet soft emotional colours to clearly express the national sentiments of the nation. And trill delicately enhances melodic representation.
Along with the development of the times, efforts are being made to improve national musical instruments in line with the modern aesthetic sense while preserving their clear and soft tone quality.
Their fine features have fully been demonstrated, thanks to the creation of Juche-oriented mixed orchestration.
“After listening to A Bumper Harvest in the Chongsan Plain, an orchestral piece incorporating national instruments, foreigners lavished praise, saying that Korean musical instruments are uniquely national and nicely express the thoughts and feelings of modern people and that the tone colours of tanso and fife are particularly inimitable,” said Kim Jo Hyok, director of the musical instrument manufacturing institute of Pyongyang Kim Won Gyun University of Music.
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