Here’s what you need to know about the Samjiyon Orchestra, which is set to play in South Korea as part of an Olympics-related thaw.
SEOUL — North Korea will send the 140-strong Samjiyon Orchestra to perform in South Korea as part of its delegation to the Winter Olympics opening ceremonies next month. The dispatch of the orchestra was the first item on the agenda when North and South Korea began discussions this week about logistical arrangements, which include the two teams again marching under a unity banner and, for the first time, plans to compete with a joint team — a women’s hockey squad with athletes from both sides.
The Samjiyon Orchestra will perform in Seoul and on the east coast in Gangneung, one of the venues for the Olympics, which the South Korean government is promoting as the “peace games.”
Here’s what you need to know about this musical group.
What exactly is the Samjiyon Orchestra?
Good question. Even experts aren’t exactly sure. North Korea has a “Samjiyon Band,” a group made up of about 50 or 60 musicians — strings, woodwind, brass, percussion — that mostly plays popular classical music. What might be called an orchestra anywhere else, except that North Korea calls a “band.”
“Samjiyon Orchestra is not like the symphony orchestras that we know. It includes singing and dancing parts as well,” Chong Chi-yong, artistic director of the Korean Symphony Orchestra and part of South Korea’s delegation, told local media.
North Korea will probably turn the band into an orchestra for this event.
“The North Korean authorities seem to treat musicians fluidly and move them around from one orchestra to another, typically without any distinction being made to the audience, so I believe that Samjiyon will follow suit,” said Adam Cathcart, a North Korea expert at the University of Leeds and an accomplished cellist who has taken close interest in North Korea’s musical groups.
But given how high-profile these performances will be, there will be additional considerations, he says.
“It seems certain that the North Korean authorities will fill the orchestra with players who can get the job done, refrain from defecting — not something the South Korean organizers of the games and related arts festivals would like to see either, presumably — and augment whatever ‘soft power’ reserves that the North has when dealing with South Korea,” Cathcart said, describing South Korea as a “bona fide musical superpower.
