When in 1994 preparations began on a massive Yun Isang music festival and it became more probably that he would be able to return to Korea, he wrote a letter to a Korean magazine in which he could not contain his excitement. Upon returning to Korea, "I will place my lips close to the earth and say, 'I love you. My true feelings have never changed.'"
But he was never able to return. The Civilian Government of president Kim Young Sam demanded that he sign a "pledge to abide by the law" of a man who had been made out to be a North Korean spy after murderous torture by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) as part of its concoction of the "Dongbaengnim affair" in 1967. He died on November 3 of the next year, having never realized his desire to see his home of Tongyeong, South Gyeongsang Province. He had always kept a faded picture of his hometown near his bed.
He also wrote of a wish he would never accomplish. Upon he returning to Korea, he "would have worked on music-related exchange between North and South Korea and the modernization of singing narratives of the southern provincial regions. If that leisurely and winding method of singing is modernized it will open up a truly magnificent new realm of music. Inter-Korean contact through music will have an effective influence on ending the tragedy of national division."
Now, on the tenth anniversary of his death, students and musicians from Germany and North and South Korea are holding an international music festival in his remembrance. It began in Pyongyang (October 26 – 28) and then moved to Beijing (October 30). It starts Tuesday in Seoul and Tongyeong and includes a commemorative event (November 3), then comes to an end in Berlin (November 3 – 5). Yun "said he would have been fine not having been a composer had the world been at peace," says former student Hong Eun Mi. "His sensibilities were already crying with souls in pain, and music composition came after that."
Yun desperately wanted to sing and act out peace and reconciliation. The fatherland that should be so proud of him keeps his soul locked up on an espionage sentence. Who needs to apologize and sign a "pledge to abide by the law"? Yun Isang or the Republic of Korea?
The Hankyoreh, 1 November 2005.
[Translations by Seoul Selection]
[Editorial] Korea Should Apologize About Yun Isang |
