Kay Kyurim Rhie
About this Artist
Kay Rhie (이규림) often explores in her music the issues of belonging and the science of acoustics. Born in South Korea, she grew up in Los Angeles and trained in both the West and the East Coast. Her immigrant experience since her teenage years has given her an artistic base as a hybridizer. She accesses a wide-ranging palette of inspiration from classical, film, European avant-gardes music as well as various literary and artistic traditions. Her musical studies began in South Korea on the piano from the age of 7, and continued at the University of California at Los Angeles and Cornell University. She is currently Assistant Professor of Composition and Theory at the University of California at Los Angeles. Her chamber opera Quake was premiered by Opera UCLA in 2023. She is currently working on her large ensemble commission for the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition.
Rhie was a recipient of the Charles Ives Fellowship given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2008, which said her music has “vehemence and reticence,” where “intimacy and plainness co-exist.” She was awarded the Grand Prize for the Ojai Music Festival in 2001, Il-shin Composition Award in 2021, Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Grant Award in 2022. Residences have included the Aspen Music Festival (2003), and the Bennington Chamber Music Conference and Composers’ Forum of the East (2004). At the Tanglewood Music Center, she was the Otto Eckstein Composition Fellow and the winner of the Geffen-Solomon New Music Commission in 2007. From 2008–09, she was a Rieman and Baketel Music Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University.
Her music has been performed at the London Festival of American Music, Seoul Philharmonic’s Ars Nova Series, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Banff Centre for the Arts, the Hear Now Festival, Seal Bay Festival of American Chamber Music, Tanglewood Music Center, and the Berkeley Symphony Chamber Series. Performers include the BBC Singers, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Aperture Duo, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Ensemble TM+ (Paris), Ensemble X, In Mulieribus, the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, the Tongyeong International Music Festival (TIMF) players, Winsor Music, Cortona New Music Festival Ensemble, New Thread Saxophone Quartet, pianists Gloria Cheng and Allegra Chapman, and violinists Movses Pogossian, Andrew Jennings, Georgia Hannant, Josh Modney and Violists Ralf Ehlers, Wendy Richman, and Brian Che-Yen Chen.