Jin Hi Kim (b. 1957) is both a composer and a virtuoso of the komungo, a historic Korean stringed instrument. She has received commissions from prestigious institutions such as the Kronos Quartet, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Composers’ Orchestra. She has also performed her own compositions throughout the world, including Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in her adopted country of America. 

Kim emigrated in 1980, after studying traditional historic court music in South Korea. In her own words, she traveled to the United States because,

“At that time Korea was becoming more interested in Western music than in its own traditions. It was my dream to balance out this attitude and combine Korean and Western instruments in a new kind of music. I need to learn Western music, so I came to the US in 1980. I stayed because of opportunities here to compose and perform.”

— Jin Hi Kim, interviewed in “Coming to America: Composers Speak Out” by Theodore Wiprud

Kim often performs on an innovative electric komungo (the “world’s only” one, as her professional biography notes). She plays it in this mesmerizing performance of her improvisational composition, Pale Blue Dot, with percussionist Gerry Hemingway.

Read more about Jin Hi Kim on her website.

Photograph from JinHiKim.com

“I have never attempted to be ‘new,’ but to be ‘true’ and to be human…Everything that has a soul, everything that has character, everything that is true is beautiful.”

—Ernest Bloch, as recalled by his daughter Suzanne Bloch (quoted in Voices in the Wilderness: Six American Neo-Romantic Composers by Walter Simmons)

Ernest Bloch (1880-1959) was born in Switzerland and studied music in Geneva, Frankfurt, Munich and Paris. He developed a personal style rooted both in the Impressionism modeled by his mentor Debussy, and in the expression of his deeply-felt Jewish identity. Bloch came to America in 1916 for a conducting performance, and soon emigrated with his family. He revisited his native country in the 1930s, but due to the the rising influence of Fascism in Europe, Bloch chose to return permanently to the United States. Bloch may be especially well-known to the Oregonian listeners of All Classical, because in 1939 he moved to Portland, and in 1941 he settled in Agate Beach, a coastal village near Newport, Oregon.

Bloch’s suite Poems of the Sea exemplifies his multicultural interests. He composed the suite in 1922 while he was living in Cleveland. He prefaced the work with a quotation from the iconic American poet Walt Whitman: the opening of “In Cabin’d Ships at Sea” from Leaves of Grass. With this American inspiration he weaves the sound of Debussy’s French musical Impressionism and of shtayger, traditional modes used in Ashkenazi synagogue music.

Read more about Ernest Bloch.

“I am a tango man, but my music makes people think, people who love tango and people who love good music. All ballet companies in the world are dancing my works. The jazz people love and enjoy what I do. Chamber groups that play classical repertoire are asking me to write for them.”

—Astor Piazzolla, from Astor Piazzolla: A Memoir, by Piazzolla and Natalie Gorin

Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) was three years old when his family emigrated from Argentina in 1924. They settled in Greenwich Village, where he fell in love with jazz. Astor developed into a child prodigy on the bandoneón. As a teen, he returned to Argentina where he studied tango by playing in the cafés of Buenos Aires. He also studied with classical Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera. 

In 1954, Piazzolla was awarded a scholarship to study in Paris with renowned composition pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. Initially, Piazzolla worried that he should hide his tango experience from Boulanger, but in fact she encouraged his work in that genre. Piazzolla’s mature tango style came to be known as nuevo tango, and its elements are as diverse as Piazzolla’s experience. He fuses jazz, Argentine tango, modernism and counterpoint into a language all his own.

Piazzolla begins to play his bandoneón about halfway through this electrifying performance of his Libertango (composed 1974).

Read more about Astor Piazzolla.

“I came from one country into another…where my head can be erect, where kindness and cheerfulness is dominating, and where to live is a joy and to be an expatriate of another country is the grace of God…I was driven into paradise.”

—Arnold Schoenberg, in “Two Speeches on the Jewish Situation (1934 and 1935),” in Style and Idea: Selected Writings

In 1933, Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) became one of many Jewish composers who fled Europe to escape the rising Nazi regime. In addition to Ernest Bloch, there was Kurt Weill who settled in New York, adapting brilliantly to American musical theater. Erich Wolfgang Korngold came to Los Angeles for good in 1938, becoming one of Hollywood’s most influential composers. Lukas Foss was fifteen when his family brought him to America to escape Nazism. Schoenberg ended up settling in Los Angeles like his friend Korngold.

Schoenberg initially felt somewhat out-of-place in his new country: the American music scene found his atonal style less accessible than Korngold’s neo-romantic music. However, Schoenberg did choose to become a naturalized citizen in 1941, and he influenced future generations of composers as a professor of music at UCLA. Schoenberg’s Kol nidre, Op. 39, is one of the most moving pieces he wrote after emigrating to the United States.

Read more about Arnold Schoenberg.

“Janis and I conversed about things that interested us and empathy came up right away, as did the need to really hear one another. I spoke about walking in someone else’s shoes – feeling wise – and how that impacts the strangeness in any relationship.”

—Svjetlana Bukvich, on the creative process behind her music for Janis Brenner’s Once You Are Not a Stranger, from a 2017 interview with Denise Marsa

In 1992, Svjetlana Bukvich received a scholarship to study electronic music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The Bosnian War has been raging in her hometown of Sarajevo for three months, and had effectively destroyed her successful career as a composer and pianist. She brought her scholarship letter to a bus driver evacuating people from Sarajevo, and the driver took her aboard, allowing her to leave safely and emigrate to the United States. In her book In Her Own Words: Conversations with Composers in the United States, Jennifer Kelly describes Bukvich’s music as “the result of an amalgamation of her experiences before the Bosnian War, her immigration to the United States during the war, and her subsequent time in the United States” (p. 195).

Esteemed as an educator and a leading electro-acoustic composer, Bukvich writes music with a unique blend of electronic, classical, rock and world influences, and she frequently collaborates in multimedia projects. In 2017 she wrote the score to Once You Are Not a Stranger, a multimedia dance work for the company Janis Brenner & Dancers, with art installations by Eva Petric. The company’s site explains,

“This interdisciplinary work looks at the ideas of empathy and “otherness” in a multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious world and uses the dance company as a microcosm of this world.”

Read more about Svjetlana Bukvich on her website.

Photograph from SvjetlanaBukvichMusic.com

“String Quartet No. 5 is based on two very different musical motifs, like two strangers from different cultural backgrounds who meet and become fast lovers. Throughout their courtship, neither of them changes but they get to know and understand each other on a much deeper level. Most importantly, they learn to happily live with each other.”

—Bright Sheng, from his program notes for his String Quartet No. 5, “The Miraculous”

The musical training of composer Bright Sheng (b.1955) began with piano lessons from his mother in his native Shanghai. During the Cultural Revolution, when Western arts education was suppressed in China, he studied folk music extensively in the province of Qinghai. After the Cultural Revolution, he attended the Shanghai Conservatory, then emigrated to America in 1982 to study in New York. Sheng met Leonard Bernstein in 1985 and became one of his final students.

An award-winning composer of orchestral music, chamber music, and opera, Sheng’s works have been commissioned and performed by major orchestras all over the world. He is particularly known for integrating Western and Chinese musical ideas in his concert works.

In his program notes for his String Quartet No. 5, “The Miraculous” (2007), Sheng states that part of the work’s inspiration was The Miraculous Mandarin by another émigré composer, Bela Bartók. Sheng explains that while he admires Bartók’s composition, he “[does] not agree with Bartok’s almost-racist interpretation of what he saw as a ‘miraculous Mandarin.’” In his String Quartet No. 5, Sheng chose to create his own sonic concept of the miraculous, built on two motifs that he compares to “strangers from different cultural backgrounds” who “get to know and understand each other.”

Photograph from BrightSheng.com

“I have maintained an independent stand in the way I have syncretized my sounds, I have a blend that I feel very comfortable with and this is very hard to explain to anyone. The sounds emerge from me just the way that my pronunciation of English always has a touch of an accent.”

—Tania Léon, quoted in “Immigration and the American Compositional Dream: Through the Lens of History” by Carol J. Oja

Composer, conductor and educator Tania Léon (b. 1943) emigrated to the United States from Cuba in 1967. She was the founding musical director of the Dance Theater of Harlem. In 2010 she founded Composers Now, an organization and music festival dedicated to encouraging new composers and promoting musical diversity. Léon is an award-winning composer, whose works range from music for dance, to chamber music, to her recent opera, The Little Rock Nine.

León’s Alma (Soul) for flute and piano was commissioned in 2007 by Maria Martin. In this wonderful video interview, León explains “what to listen for” in Alma. She compares the flute’s melody to that of a bird in the forest, flying through the piano’s texture like a bird flies through the leaves of a tree. She also explains that through the piece’s title, her image of flight can also reflect the meditative experience of the human soul.

Read more about Tania León.

Photograph from the University of Chicago Department of Music

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) was one of the first composers to explore the expressive capabilities of the Lied [singular of Lieder, pronounced “leet”]. Many of Mozart’s Lieder were composed for the growing domestic song market. His Lieder offer the same natural vocal writing he brought to opera – and the same wide-ranging dramatic sense. For example, his “Abendemfindung” (Evening Thoughts) is a tender reflection on mortality; in contrast, his “Das Veilchen” K. 476 (The Violet) is a playful, rather snarky setting of a poem by Goethe about a dramatic violet’s tragic love for an oblivious shepherdess.

Other Classical composers who wrote in the burgeoning Lied genre include Louise Reichardt,  Joseph Haydn, and Ludwig van Beethoven, who invented the song cycle (more on that next!).

Song Text

In 1816, Ludwig van Beethoven had the idea of writing a set of six Lieder with an overarching narrative: his An die ferne Geliebte (To the Distant Beloved). This new genre came to be known as a Liederkries, or in English, a song cycle. Some song cycles tell a story, some have a common theme, and some are merely meant to be sung in a series for aesthetic reasons. They’re a bit like the 19th century’s version of the record album. 

Franz Schubert (1797–1828) was a master of the Lied. He composed more than 900 Lieder, many of which had their premieres at musical home gatherings, which Schubert’s friends delightfully called Schubertiades. Schubert perfected the song cycle in works like his narrative cycle Die schöne Müllerin (The Beautiful Miller Maid), as well as cycles linked by a common author, like his Op.52 settings from Sir Walther Scott’s Lady of the Lake. Perhaps his greatest song cycle is Winterreise D. 911 (Winter Journey), a psychologically profound exploration of loss.

Song Text

As the 19th century progressed, composers like Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Hugo Wolf added increasingly sophisticated song cycles and individual Lieder to the repertoire. Many Lieder became increasingly complex for the average home musician: the solo recital was becoming a popular style of performance, thanks to Franz Liszt, who invented the term, and composers were writing for the skills of professional recitalists as well as for amateurs.

However, the Lied was still an entrenched home music genre, and that gave a special edge to women composers in the 19th century. Many women who wrote symphonic music or chamber music in the Romantic period struggled to promote interest in their work, but since the Lied was considered a domestic genre, women faced fewer barriers to being accepted as composers of art song.

Women took advantage of this creative outlet to produce glorious art songs, many of which differ from the male-composed repertoire by examining love and life from a woman’s perspective. Some notable composers include Josephine Lang, Clara Schumann, and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805–1847), whose “Warum sind denn die Rosen so blass” is an elegant example of the Romantic Lied.

Song Text

German-speaking composers did much of the early work developing the art song genre, but it spread among composers of many languages. For example, French art song is known as mélodie. Countless French composers made gorgeous additions to the genre through the 19th century and beyond, including Pauline Viardot, Henri Duparc, Ernest Chausson, Cécile Chaminade, and Claude Debussy. 

If we were to crown a French Schubert, whose stature in mélodieresembles that of Schubert in Lieder, it might be Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924). Fauré composed more than 100 art songs, including both individual songs and song cycles. His masterful, text-sensitive writing for both voice and piano makes his art songs perennially popular with singers.

Song Text 

Traditionally, art song is scored for voice and piano, but music genre rules have never been set in stone, especially during the experimental Romantic period. One early Lied-scoring exception is Schubert’s “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen“ D.965 (The Shepherd on the Rock), which is scored for voice, piano, and clarinet.

In the mid-1800s, orchestral songs began to grace the concert stage. Unlike opera or oratorio arias, these songs were not intended as part of a larger ensemble work, but were simply standalone art songs or song cycles using orchestral accompaniment instead of piano. 

An early example of Romantic orchestral song was Hector Berlioz’s orchestration of his song cycle Les nuits d’ete Op. 7 (Summer Nights, pub. 1856). Many Romantic composers contributed to the genre of orchestral song, especially in the form of orchestral song cycles. Examples include Richard Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder and Alma Mahler-Werfel’s Four Songs for Soprano and Orchestra (1915).

Perhaps the best-known composer of Romantic orchestral Lieder was Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), whose orchestral song cycles remain staples of the repertory. His Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn, pub. 1905) consists of orchestral songs for mezzo soprano and baritone. The texts are German folk poems that range from dark musings to cynical allegories to charming fairy tales.

Song Text

Around the same time that German composers were diving into orchestral Lieder, English-speaking composers were starting to give special attention to art song. The rhapsodic songs of George Butterworth and Ivor Gurney helped singers give voice to the trauma surrounding the First World War. Ethel Smyth, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten, and many other English composers contributed to the 20th century’s flowering of English song.

English-language art song flourished in the United States as well, in the works of composers like Amy Beach, Aaron Copland, and Samuel Barber. Folk song inspired many American composers of art song, including Harry T. Burleigh and John Jacob Niles.

One remarkable partnership in American art song was that between poet Langston Hughes and composer Florence Price (1887–1953). Both were pivotal figures in the Chicago Renaissance, and Price set Hughes’s poetry in several masterful art songs, which were championed by Leontyne Price, Marian Anderson, and other great Black singers.

Song Text