Kim Jong Il considered the 1971 premiere of the opera Sea of Blood a watershed moment in opera history. He lauded its innovative use of chŏlga (‘stanzaic song’) rather than aria and recitative. By Western analytical standards, however, chŏlga is simple and predictable, so scholars have thus far glossed over its conventions and their signification. This article instead argues that chŏlga conventions exhibit cultural hybridity and that Kim leveraged such hybridity to advocate a modern, popular, and national sound for North Korea. I begin by outlining hybrid characteristics of colonial-era popular music that chŏlga inherited. I then explore Kim's engagement with such trends in his speeches on chŏlga and demonstrate that cultural hybridity was central to his understanding of sonic modernity. Finally, I analyse a scene from Sea of Blood that pits chŏlga against other music genres, leading to a symbolic victory for the form and for the Korean nation.

Despite the attention given to the transnational circulation of Andean music, its reception and adoption by European musicians have been rarely researched. This article focuses on the specific case of Italy, where the Andean music boom blended with that of the New Chilean Song in exile (1973–89) and where, in addition, repertoires and practices of both musics were adopted by dozens of local groups formed by young Italians. Those Italian groups – with their performative strategies and their choices of repertoires – provide a privileged lookout about how different representations of the andeaneity (the Nueva Canción Chilena with its ethical and political connotations, the musique des Andes of the French matrix, the autóctonas indigenist currents) interacted in creating an Italian imagery of the Andes. They also suggest how the adoption of ‘someone else's music’ can act, with its transcultural complexity, in the elaboration of personal narratives of identity.