It’s a trajectory seen over and over again in the arts: as a committed performer doggedly works to hone their skills, meeting the highest standards of speed, expressiveness, and complexity, they ultimately cross a threshold and come to embrace … sheer simplicity. That’s one way to look at the evolution of Eunbi Kim, a celebrated pianist being hosted by the Iris Collective and The Green Room at Crosstown Arts this Saturday, February 21st. Along with compositions created specifically for her by some of the contemporary classical world’s finest composers, she’ll also be playing works in a genre you don’t often associate with the classical world: lullabies.
“I come from a pretty rigorous and traditional classical training background, steeped in the classical canon from a really young age,” Kim says. “By the time I reached college I was pretty burned out. And from then on, I was always searching for a way to pursue music in a way that was more aligned with how I wanted to express myself.”
Thus, by the time she reached the height of her education at the Manhattan School of Music, she’d passed through a crucible of sorts and landed in an unexpected new world. “When I went to grad school, I discovered contemporary music,” she explains, “and that evolved into learning more experimental music and working directly with composers who write music for me. Then I started working with new media artists who create visuals and projections and soundscapes that create more of an immersive experience for the listener, rather than like a traditional recital.”
That will certainly be apparent this Saturday, with her performance enhanced with visuals by the new media artist and filmmaker Xuan. “For much of it, she used old archives of my family — so old photographs, old home videos — and treated them like a collage,” Kim says of Xuan. “And the visuals, I think, add sort of an ambient layer to the program, where they help create a mood and ask questions, but don’t really show a narrative.”
The very personal element of such imagery is quite in keeping with Kim’s 2022 album, It Feels Like, which debuted at #2 on the Billboard classical charts and often forms the core of her performances. It’s her most personal work to date, dealing with themes of childhood, family, and memory. And yet, such elements are presented through the eyes and ears of others. “I don’t consider myself a composer, although I work with composers,” Kim says, and the album features works written for her by Angélica Negrón, Pauchi Sasaki, Sophia Jani, and Daniel Bernard Roumain, who all took cues from Kim’s life story.
That’s most apparent in the opening track, “It Feels Like a Mountain, Chasing Me,” composed by Roumain. “The initial plan was to record sort of ambient sounds in my apartment,” says Kim, “but we ended up recording a conversation about our parents and so forth, and then [Roumain] incorporated that into the piece, with these pre-recorded voices and electronics. Then I used that piece as the foundation for the rest of the music.”
So did the other composers she worked with, all of them responding to Roumain’s initial work. What emerges is a powerful meditation on Kim’s heritage in South Korea, where she was born but remembers nothing about, having been raised in Maryland from the age of three.
Another aspect of Saturday’s show will also focus on family, but not Kim’s own. Rather, it grew out of the Iris Collective’s collaboration with the Memphis Oral School for the Deaf. “We’re an official partner organization with Carnegie Hall’s Lullaby Project,” says Rebecca Arendt, executive director of Iris. “So we’re working with five families to help them write lullabies for their children to express love, help with family bonding, but also as a tool to encourage speaking and listening at home with their kids every night. Marcin Arendt, our lead Lullaby Project teaching artist, has worked with Mahir Cetiz, who’s arranged the lullabies into a song cycle for a piano trio and singer.”
Kim, for her part, is delighted by this one-of-a-kind Memphis performance. “I just received the music for the lullabies the parents wrote for their children,” she says. “Just seeing the lyrics made me so teary.”