Rubbing Musical Elbows

My musical talent, as the saying goes, would fit into a thimble with room left over for three raisins and a caraway seed. Consequently, I am in awe of those who make music, whether as composers or performers. In Bloomington, Indiana, where we have the renowned Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, you can’t throw a paper airplane without hitting an accomplished musician.

This means that ordinary folk like me get to rub elbows with some fascinating and accomplished individuals, whether it’s running into (not literally, thankfully) jazz and classical composer, conductor, and teacher David Baker on the jogging track at the local YMCA, being greeted at a reception by opera soprano Sylvia McNair, sharing lemonade and munchies with young harpists in the home of Susann McDonald, founder of the USA International Harp Competition, or enjoying a pitch-in dinner with music scholar and authority on the American composer Charles Ives, Peter Burkholder—and those are just four of the faculty. I did a double-take not long ago when I noticed that the keyboardist in a local rock cover band, playing a pizza joint-cum-music club that evening, was a well-known classical organist and IU professor that I’d last seen performing Bach in a much different setting.

But it’s the students that really awe me. The tenor or the soprano who’s soloing in our church choir not unusually can also be spotted in an opera on campus or a musical play somewhere in town, or may well be headlining at a local jazz club.

A recent acquaintance has been Texu Kim, an unassuming graduate student from Seoul, Korea. Tex, as he’s called, is doing doctoral studies in music composition at the Jacobs School. He’s so modest and unassuming that it took me several conversations to realize that this young composer is already amazingly accomplished. This past academic year alone he has flown to Paris and Frankfurt for premieres of his compositions.

In Paris this past January, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, directed by Finnish conductor Susanna Mälkki, performed his “Toccata Inquieta,” a work for solo harpsichord and ensemble. The harpsichordist was Dimitri Vassilakis. The concert also was broadcast in Germany on Deutschlandradio Kultur.

In an interview in Paris Tex cited influences from music played in Korean Christian churches, jazz, and rock, in addition to classical music. Tex studied chemistry before turning to music composition, and so he also tends to use mathematical and scientific principles as tools for musical composition.

In March the Paris premiere was followed by another in Frankfurt. This time the work was “Sketches for Contredanse,” with Peter Rundel directing the Ensemble Modern. The composition was included in a program with several other premieres in the Mozart Hall of the Alte Oper, or Old Opera (photo). Founded in 1980, the Ensemble Modern is one of the world’s leading ensembles of Contemporary Music. Currently, the ensemble is composed of musicians from Argentina, Bulgaria, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Poland, and Switzerland.

For someone who’s “just” a grad student, Tex is well on his professional career path and doing splendidly.

Texu Kim is an outstanding example, but in Bloomington he’s also in good company. There aren’t many Midwest college towns in which the guy waiting on your table at a local restaurant could well be singing at the Met next year.