Notes for: July 13, 2010
Earl Kim was a Korean-American composer and teacher. Born in Dinuba, California, to immigrant parents, he studied in Los Angeles and Berkeley with, among others, Arnold Schoenberg, Ernest Bloch, and Roger Sessions. After serving in World War II as a combat intelligence officer, he accepted a teaching position at Princeton in 1952, and in 1967 moved to Harvard, retiring in 1990. His students included Peter Maxwell Davies, John Adams, and David Del Tredici.
Kim also served terms as composer-in-residence at the Princeton Seminar in Advanced Musical Studies and at the Marlboro, Dartmouth, Tanglewood, Cape and Islands, and Aspen Music Festivals. In addition, he was active as a pianist, playing in lieder recitals with Bethany Beardslee, Benita Valente and Dawn Upshaw, and as a vocal coach and conductor.
As a composer, Kim received commissions from the Fromm, Koussevitzky and Naumburg Foundations and from the University of Chicago and Boston University, and grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, National Institute of Arts and Letters, and Boston Symphony.
Kim was especially admired for his vocal works, particularly musical theater and settings of poetry. Versed in several languages, he selected texts by the French symbolists with their emphasis on unstructured and ambiguous expression, and such authors as Rilke, Anne Sexton and, his favorite, Samuel Beckett.
Composed in 1989, his Three Poems in French were settings of French poets – “En Sourdine” (“Muted”) and “Colloque Sentimental” (“Sentimental Colloquy”) by Paul Verlaine and “Recueillement” (“Meditation”) by Charles Baudelaire. According to Kim, the work fulfilled “a longstanding desire on my part to do a setting of some texts in French. I have always been intrigued and deeply moved by the special qualities inherent in French impressionism. Composing the Three Poems in French was a way of entering more completely into that exotic and passionate realm.”
Kim was interested in how different composers set the same text, each reflecting his or her own tradition and style. In this case, all three of these verses had been previously set by Debussy and “En Sourdine” also by Fauré, in the sonorous harmony of French impressionism. In comparison, Kim’s settings are sparse, restrained, subdued, even repressed, and they thus parallel the poetry’s expression of disillusionment, bitterness and the loss of love.