N.Y. Philharmonic announces musical selections for Pyongyang

Let me say it: I’m very pleased that Dvorak’s 9th Symphony will be on the program. Those who are familiar with this music will know its optimistic, sweeping, subversive majesty. If allowed only one word to describe it, I would choose “open.” Here are links to the bucolic first movement and the triumphant fourth movement.
When I hear Dvorak’s Ninth, I always think of this very place, though I don’t think any photograph could ever capture all 360 degrees of the drive from Rapid City to Hot Springs on Highway 79, with the Black Hills to the West, hundreds of miles of sagebrush-scented prairie to the East, and to the Southeast, the jagged Badlands horizon. Just two weeks ago, that music played in my mind as I drove that very road with my children and my wife, who was awed (and maybe a bit depressed) by the frozen, empty bleakness of it in December.

A girl from Seoul has never seen so much empty space. Perhaps a citizen of Pyongyang accustomed to strident marches and mindless accordion music has never heard such an open sound. But with the number of great Korean musicians and conductors, the Korean character certainly isn’t barren earth for the seeds music could sow.
At the turnoff for Hot Springs, the Highway meets the Cheyenee River. I often fished for bullheads and bluegill behind the blue Pentagon-shaped sign in this picture, and a rattlesnake my brother’s friend shot there ended up as a hat band.

I suppose I don’t know how much money North Korea will make from this concert, although I really don’t think this concert will affect North Korea’s politics or diplomacy much either way. Maybe it seems too sentimental to think that a selection of music cause anyone to question the world’s most repressive totalitarian system. But if any music can do it, this is it.

Possibly related: Dvorak’s homeland has ordered out North Korean slave labor shops by the end of January.