- This event has passed.
Documentary Feature Film – “Earl.”
May 29 at 7:00 PM - 9:30 PM
FreeCo-presented by the Korean Cultural Center New York & The Sejong Soloists
Wednesday, May 29, 2024 at 7:00pm (Doors Open at 6:30pm)
Korean Cultural Center New York
(122 E 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016)
Admission: FREE (RSVP required)
– RSVP and seating are on a first-come, first-served basis.
* Following the screening, there will be a Q&A with the Film’s Director Ty Kim
* Run time: approximately 2 hours 30 minutes including Q&A
* Advanced screening of a work in progress
The Korean Cultural Center New York (KCCNY) is excited to present a special advanced screening of the documentary feature film “Earl.” directed by the Emmy award-winning director and producer Ty Kim.
The film is about an American composer named Earl Kim (1920-1998) who grew up in abject poverty and died before his brilliant work was recognized by the public at large. His life is an extraordinary, current, and relevant story that spans not only the world of classical music but of education, politics, war, peace, human rights, and even weapons of mass destruction. Most of all, the power of music to change lives.
As a child, Earl Kim learned the keyboard from a church organist and later received free piano lessons for seven years from a Los Angeles composer and touring artist. Earl was a prodigy. Through sheer determination and grit, he studied with some of the greatest composers of the modern era including Arnold Schoenberg (at UCLA), Ernest Bloch, and Roger Sessions (at UC Berkeley).
His dream of becoming a composer was interrupted by war. Earl was drafted in 1941 and served his country as a US Army Air Force Combat Intelligence Officer. He flew fifty feet above the destruction of Nagasaki, one day after the atomic bomb was dropped. Earl was haunted by what he saw. More than thirty years passed before he would later use this harrowing experience as fuel to write a profound musical composition “Now and Then”. In 1981, Earl formed Musicians Against Nuclear Arms (MANA) and served as its president for four years.
When Earl returned home from war, he stood up against McCarthyism and was fired by UC Berkeley after refusing to sign the Loyalty Oath. He went on to teach at Princeton (where the documentary film was presented a few weeks ago) for 15 years and at Harvard (where the film will be shown by invitation in March 2025).
In 1961, Earl began his collaboration with the writer Samuel Beckett (who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969). Earl’s Violin Concerto was made into an album with the legendary violinist Itzhak Perlman, the late Seiji Ozawa, and The Boston Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Perlman is one of the artists featured in this new documentary.