On Monday, December 10th, the New York Philharmonic announced that it will be traveling to North Korea to perform a concert there on February 26th. The concert, which will come at the end of the orchestra's China tour, will include pieces by Gershwin, Dvorak and both the US and North Korean national anthem.
What has startled me most about this recent announcement is the negative reaction it has received from some. For example, I heard Terry Teachout interviewed on CNN just before the announcement was official and he berated the orchestra for crossing boundaries of political hostilities. If the United States has diplomatic sanctions on North Korea, he argued, why should we freely offer them our musical pleasures?
This point of view seems to me to show an egregious misunderstanding of music's role in history as a political equalizer. Perhaps I'm under the influence of The Rest is Noise, but even during the totalitarian reigns of Hitler and Stalin when music was at its most highly politicized, music served as a no man's land where many composers were able to communicate with the outside through their universal language. Even some Jewish musicians were spared by Hitler because their musicality raised them above their ethnicity. Can't that same universality help us today, even if classical music isn't the soul of our culture as it perhaps used to be? I guess I should be heartened that an orchestra's touring schedule still has the power to elicit passionate responses from politicians, journalists and music fans alike.
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