Earl Kim

Earl Kim was a significant American twentieth hundred years composer whose typically gentle sonorities, sparse instrumentation, and feeling of secret gave his often eclectic music a distinctive character. He had written both in tonal and atonal designs, often blending them, and got a specific fondness for placing text messages of Samuel Beckett, specifically in larger functions, like his one-act opera Footfalls. Kim was created in Dinuba, CA, on January 6, 1920, the 3rd child of Korean immigrants. While he started music studies fairly late — 1st acquiring piano lessons at age group 9 — he’d at age group 19 (1939) show precocious enough to review theory and structure at UCLA with Arnold Schoenberg, and at 20 to become pupil of Ernest Bloch at Berkeley. Kim’s research had been interrupted by the next World Battle: he became a member of the Military to serve in its Cleverness service. Following the battle he made up his 1st works, including the Bagatelles, for piano (1948-1950). For this period he came back to Berkeley to review structure with Roger Classes, graduating in 1952 having a master’s level. Down the road, Kim recognized the impact of Schoenberg, Bloch, and Classes on his music, but this imposing trio wouldn’t normally get away Kim’s parodies of their music in his. He became a member of the faculty at Princeton in 1952, and it had been during his years teaching there that he started focus on his 1st Beckett establishing — Exercises on the way (1963-1970), for soprano, chamber ensemble, stars, etc. Kim remaining Princeton in 1967 for any teaching post at Harvard, where he continued to be until 1990. A few of his most significant compositions date towards the 1970s and early ’80s: Eh Joe (1974), a teleplay, for feminine vocalist and chamber ensemble; Violin Concerto (1979), premiered by Itzhak Perlman; and his 1981 opera Footfalls. Kim was energetic in politics, especially in the 1980s, co-founding Music artists Against Nuclear Hands in 1981 and providing as its chief executive for four years. In 1990, the entire year he retired from Harvard, he also resigned as co-chairman from the music -panel at the Country wide Endowment from the Arts, however in protest of financing limitations enacted by Congress that affected numerous NEA-financed artistic tasks. After Kim’s 1990 pension he remained energetic in composition, generating such functions as Dear Linda, for feminine vocalist and chamber ensemble (1992). Kim passed away of lung malignancy on November 19, 1998, in Cambridge, MA.