Earl Kim
Earl Kim was a prominent Korean-American composer, educator, and pianist known for his contributions to modernist music during the latter half of the twentieth century. Born Eul Kim to Korean immigrants, he began piano studies at age nine and later attended prestigious institutions, studying under renowned composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Ernest Bloch. Kim's teaching career spanned several decades at Princeton and Harvard, where he influenced notable musicians including John Adams and David Del Tredici. As a composer, he was recognized for his unique treatment of texts, particularly those by Samuel Beckett, and his innovative use of dissonance and sparse instrumentation.
His works often featured unusual combinations of instruments and incorporated elements from various cultural traditions. An ardent anti-nuclear activist, Kim co-founded Musicians Against Nuclear Arms and used his platform to raise awareness against nuclear warfare. Diagnosed with lung cancer in 1998, he continued to promote his music until his passing, leading to a posthumous release of his works. Kim's legacy is marked by his ability to blend narrative and introspective elements in his compositions, solidifying his role as a significant figure in contemporary music.
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Subject Terms
Earl Kim
Composer, educator, and activist
- Born: January 6, 1920
- Place of Birth: Dinuba, California
- Died: November 19, 1998
- Place of Death: Cambridge, Massachusetts
A respected music educator and accomplished pianist, Earl Kim distinguished himself as a leading composer of modernist music in the latter half of the twentieth century. He garnered recognition for his treatment of texts, especially those of Samuel Beckett, and for an exceptional attention to the nuance of performance.
Birth name: Eul Kim
Areas of achievement: Music, education, activism
Early Life
The youngest of three boys born to Korean immigrants Sung Kwan and Sarah Kang Kim, Earl Kim began studying piano at nine years of age. He later enrolled at University of California, Los Angeles, in 1939 to study composition and theory with famed composer Arnold Schoenberg, but he transferred the following year to the University of California, Berkeley, where he came under the guidance of another much-revered composer, Ernest Bloch. With the United States’ entry into World War II, Kim interrupted his musical studies to enlist in the US Army Air Force in April 1942 as an intelligence officer in the southwestern Pacific. At the end of the war, Kim returned to Berkeley to complete his bachelor’s degree in 1950 and his master’s degree in music in 1952 while studying with composer Roger Sessions. He completed a second master's degree at Harvard in 1967.
Life’s Work
After graduating, Kim embarked on his teaching career at Princeton, where he taught until 1967. He then joined the faculty at Harvard, where he was appointed James Edward Ditson Professor of Music in 1971, a position he held until his retirement in 1990. Among his students were such notable musicians as John Adams, David Del Tredici, Peter Maxwell Davies, David Lewin, and Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson. Kim maintained an active and widely lauded role as a composer, pianist, conductor, and vocal coach throughout his career in academia.
As a composer, Kim created lean works that freely employed dissonance and musical palindromes effectively interspersed with silences. His sparse instrumentation often doubled vocal lines or shared melodic material in a style comparable to Austrian composer Anton Webern’s Klangfarbenmelodie works. Singers such as Bethany Beardslee, Dawn Upshaw, and Benita Valente noted Kim’s painstaking attention to the rhythms and intonation of natural speech and his tendency to tailor his works up to the moment of performance. Kim commonly employed unique combinations of instruments and included unusual percussion, such as African and Japanese hand and stick drums, Japanese bells, and wood clappers, as in the stage drama Exercises en Route, begun in 1963 and completed in 1970.
Kim revealed a particular propensity for vocal works and set to music texts by a wide range of poets, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Charles Baudelaire, Anton Chekhov, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Ranier Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud, Anne Sexton, Paul Verlaine, and William Butler Yeats. Kim particularly favored the words of Samuel Beckett, a dark and reclusive avant-garde Irish poet who seldom granted permission for the use of his texts but preferred Kim’s settings. Principal works based on Beckett include Exercises en Route, as well as a multimedia narrative featuring lights, called Earthlight (1973), the teleplay Eh Joe (1974), the opera Footfalls (1981), and semi-sung narratives such as Melodrama (1974) and Lessness (1979).
From the mid-1950s, Kim’s works were regularly performed at music festivals in Lenox, Massachusetts; Aspen, Colorado; Marlboro, Vermont; and Dartmouth, England. He also enjoyed a steady stream of commissions, grants, and awards from such prestigious organizations as the Boston Symphony, Brandeis University, the Fromm Music Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Gaudeamus Foundation in Amsterdam, the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, the National Institute and American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Walter W. Naumberg Foundation. A particularly notable commission came from violinist Itzhak Perlman in 1979 for the Violin Concerto, a one-movement theme and variations work premiered by Perlman with the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Zubin Mehta.
Having witnessed the devastation of the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan, firsthand in 1945, Kim became an ardent antinuclear activist. He composed a quietly austere protest against nuclear war, Now and Then: 1981, and in 1982 cofounded the organization Musicians Against Nuclear Arms (MANA). During his three-year tenure as president of MANA, Kim helped coordinate a 1983 concert presided over by conductor Zubin Mehta at Avery Fisher Hall in New York. The event, featuring over two hundred musicians from establishments such as the New York Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic and notable personalities such as Kathleen Battle, Jessye Norman, Paul Newman, George F. Kennan, and Helen Caldicott, raised some $500,000 for Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Nuclear Weapons Education Fund to promote a bilateral US-Soviet nuclear arms freeze. Kim’s activism expanded to free speech issues when he publicly resigned as cochair of a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) music panel to protest Senator Jessie Helms’s legislative proposal to prohibit NEA support for works subjectively deemed unsuitable.
Diagnosed with lung cancer in the spring of 1998, Kim worked closely with conductor Scott Yoo and the Metamorphosen Chamber Ensemble to produce the first CD devoted exclusively to Kim’s works. Supported by grants from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the Edward T. Cone Foundation, the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, the Susan W. Rose Fund for Music, the Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts, and the New York State Council on the Arts, the posthumous release featured sopranos Karol Bennett and Benita Valente, as well as narration by Kim’s daughter, Eva. In 2024, the documentary film Earl, directed by Ty Kim, debuted.
Significance
Earl Kim fully integrated himself into the fabric of modern composition in the late twentieth century. A master of textual phrasing, Kim managed introspective and narrative compositions that brought an attainable aspect to the lasting impression of Schoenberg and the second Viennese school of composers.
Bibliography
Anderson, Martin. "Obituary: Earl Kim." The Independent, 2 Dec. 1998, www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-earl-kim-1188605.html. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.
Barkin, Elaine. “Earl Kim: Earthlight.” Perspectives of New Music 19.1–2 (1980–81): 269–77. Print.
"Documentary Feature Film--'Earl.'" Korean Cultural Center NY, 2024, www.koreanculture.org/films/2024/05/29/documentary-earl. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.
Jeffers, Grant Lyle, and Gertrude Stein. Non-Narrative Music Drama. Diss. U of California, Los Angeles, 1983. Print.
Marks, Kent. “The Interior Monologue in Earl Kim’s Violin Concerto.” Perspectives of New Music 34.2 (1996): 106–31. Print.