Professor Pak Hyong Sop, PhD, is credited with teaching and studying the traditional Korean music. The candidate academician works as section chief of the Juche Music Research Institute of the Pyongyang Kim Won Gyun University of Music and Dance.

First Manual

The fourth son of a tenant, Pak was born in a remote village in Sinam-ri, Chonnae County, Kangwon Province, in 1939 when Korea was still under Japan’s military rule. In 1945 the country was liberated, and the following year Pak began schooling. After school he used to graze the cattle.

In those days he liked to play the flute on the ox back and he was good at playing a tune, though not knowing how to sight-read. After finishing the middle school course, he was admitted into the then Pyongyang University of Music thanks to a government measure.

He began to teach at his alma mater in March 1963 after graduation. He came to have a better understanding of the long history, advantage, vitality of the traditional Korean music, as well as the people’s aspiration to and demand for it, resolving to devote himself to its study and development.

To begin with, he set about compiling a manual for playing the tanso , a traditional Korean bamboo flute dating back to the mid-15th century.

Tanso playing had only been learnt by way of teaching personally by the early 1960s.

It was essential to compile a textbook like a manual in order to properly teach the traditional music to students. Pak racked his brains day and night and enlisted the help of old professors, completing the book Manual of Tanso Playing in 1965, the first of its kind in the country.

His manual set the stage for other manuals, graduses and collections prepared by different departments for fife, saenap (Korean brass wind instrument), kayagum (Korean harp), yanggum (Korean zither) and haegum (Korean fiddle), according to a state measure.

Teaching for Over 40 Years

With a 40-odd-year teaching career, Pak Hyong Sop has compiled at least 30 textbooks and reference books such as Collection of Korean Folk Songs (nine volumes), Collection of Korean Mask Dances and Songs , Encyclopedia of Traditional Musical Instruments and Complete Collection of Traditional Music , and pioneered some subjects like “principles of rendition”.

While teaching students how to play the tanso and practising himself singing local folk songs including those in the northwestern part of the country, he discovered some laws in the rendition and singing of folk songs.

He put them together and systematized the folk songs in a scientific and theoretical way, and wrote an essay “Theories about performing Korean folk songs” in late 1989.

His essay was acclaimed by the academic circles and it earned him the doctor’s degree in music for the first time in the country in June 1991.

Pak excelled himself in tanso solo at university presentations and national contests, and trained many tanso performers.

He took part in over 10 international seminars and performances and introduced the development of the traditional Korean music while teaching at home and abroad on dozens of occasions.

At the university he has taken up different posts as department chief, dean and head of the institute, and engaged himself in turning age-old musical tales into scores and collecting and arranging them.

He was instrumental in discovering, collecting and arranging thousands of pieces of materials, especially a collection of documents “The origin of Komungo (Korean lute)”, a book of scores “Songs in the period of enlightenment” and the opera “Eight fairies of Mt Kumgang” (scores), and turning local musical heritage into vocal music for permanent collection.

On the Crest of a Wave

Pak lives in Munsu Street, Taedonggang District, Pyongyang. A wall of his living room is full of photos he had taken with President Kim Il Sung , Chairman Kim Jong Il and the respected Comrade Kim Jong Un , certificates of his participation in major national events such as the Eighth Conference of Ideological Workers of the Workers' Party of Korea and the Conference of Korean Intellectuals, certificates of his doctorship, professorship and title of candidate academician, and diplomas of his orders and medals.

Each time he stands before them, he looks back on his career with pride.

“This is a very good time and a good era to live in. It makes me happy and full of emotion,” he says.

He adds that he thinks no talents are given full play in every era and they can be displayed under the good care of the benevolent motherland.

A man of high repute at home and abroad as a traditional Korean music artiste, Pak Hyong Sop is still putting his heart and soul into the research work and teaching.

Yang Ryon Hui