Two Song love-songs, alive only because they emigrated

Claim (verbatim)

Alongside its Confucian ritual aak, the Korean court preserved dangak (唐樂) - secular banquet music of Chinese, specifically Song-dynasty, origin. The music treatise of the Goryeosa (高麗史 樂志, compiled 1451) records a substantial body of imported Song material, including a set of Song ci (詞) song-melodies used in court entertainment. In China these secular Song melodies did not survive as sounding music; the ci became a purely literary form, its tunes lost. In Korea a tiny number survived in continuous court performance: the pieces known as Nakyangchun (洛陽春) and Boheoja (步虛子), routinely described as the only Song-dynasty secular melodies still played anywhere. This is the survival inversion in miniature and with named survivors: of the sizable imported dangak repertoire the Goryeosa lists, essentially all is gone even in Korea except a residue of one or two pieces - and that residue is the entire world-surviving stock of performed Song secular melody. The mechanism, again, is that transplant into a fixed ceremonial function preserves a few pieces past the death of the whole living tradition, in the adopting country rather than the source. Prediction restated: the surviving performed dangak is a single-digit remnant of the Goryeosa's imported list, and the count of Song secular melodies in continuous performance is greater in Korea than in China, where it is zero.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: comparing the dangak and Song-derived repertoire listed in the Goryeosa music treatise (高麗史 樂志) with what survives in continuous Korean court performance today, fewer than five pieces will remain performed (with Nakyangchun and Boheoja the core survivors), a survival rate under 15 percent of the listed dangak items, while the count in continuous Chinese performance is zero. Primary clause: performed Korean dangak survivors number fewer than five and exceed the Chinese count of zero. Disambiguation: "continuous performance" excludes modern reconstructions; a piece counts as surviving only with an unbroken court-performance lineage. Coverage guard: if the Goryeosa dangak and ci-melody list cannot be enumerated to at least 20 items, the test voids.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Goryeosa music treatise (高麗史 樂志) dangak and Song ci-melody lists for the imported baseline, against the living dangak repertoire of the National Gugak Center (Nakyangchun 洛陽春, Boheoja 步虛子) and the absence of continuous Song-secular-melody performance in China - tally surviving performed pieces by country.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

'Only two dangak pieces survive - Boheoja and Nakyangchun' is the stock sentence of Korean music history, printed in the surveys and in the National Gugak Center's own repertoire documentation, usually with the corollary that these are the only Song secular melodies still performed anywhere; Condit's monograph establishes the pieces' Song derivation and their continuous, heavily Koreanized court transmission from the fifteenth-century sources. With the Goryeosa akji's dangak list itself published (forty-odd ci-songs), every element of the primary clause - fewer than five, more than zero, China zero - is stated or arithmetically guaranteed in print.

• J. Condit, Music of the Korean Renaissance: Songs and Dances of the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)
• Song Bang-song, Korean Music: Historical and Other Aspects (Seoul: Jimoondang, 2000)
• National Gugak Center documentation of the living dangak repertoire (Boheoja, Nakyangchun)

Predictions

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