Clara Kim: our little matches

letters to a screen was written for an event that raised awareness around political prisoners. Kim examines the experience of imprisonment through the lens of modes of communication, as they have shifted from the personal intimacy of handwritten letters to the imposed distance of phone and electronic interfaces that are often compromised by for-profit exploitative forces. The composition explores this alienation by establishing multiple layers of activity, combining performance by live musicians, sampled recordings, and MIDI realizations. The result is a disorienting sonic landscape where it is not entirely clear what is real. Strains of Strauss’ Metamorphosen are heard as if they were coming from a cave, melodramatic emotions placed out of reach. Over the course of the work, a struggle emerges wherein the live performers endeavor to connect through the haze of the unreal, only to find their message obscured once again.

Kim’s own transition as a trans woman was the catalyst for the composition of the electro-acoustic work extinguishing dance. Normative social hierarchies and orthodoxies lie at the heart of the impetus for the piece, a gesture towards the almost sacrificial dance that one who challenges societal conventions finds themselves subjected to. Resonant, microtonally pitched chimes and gongs are present throughout the piece, creating a ritualistic frame. We hear sampled recordings emerge and recede from the foreground; a striking series of electronic tones divide the piece at its midpoint, almost like the warning sound of the Emergency Broadcast System. Cathartic, distorted chords wash over the texture towards the work’s close, capturing the internal world of an individual forced to grapple with unnatural social impositions surrounding identity.

On reliquary for piano quartet, Kim confronts the complex legacy of the European classical canon, embedding quotes from canonic works as if they were irrelevant relics of a tarnished past. The work begins with a crescendo on a unison pitch, a nod to a traditional opening, before it quickly disintegrates into extended techniques in the strings. We hear swells of late Romantic gestures diffuse into disembodied, tactile ensemble textures and characteristic classical melodic phrases couched in sardonic sul ponticello timbres. The opening theme of the first movement of Brahms’ Violin Sonata #2 is heard in a loop, repeating itself as if from a broken record player. The sonic landscape revealed behind the quoted fragments is sparse and fragile, and the work closes with the performers’ footsteps as they walk off the stage one by one, having exhausted the musical language of the past’s remnants.

how warm a little match would be returns to the electronic format, conjuring both Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Match Girl and Helmut Lachenmann’s operatic setting of the classic fairy tale. In Anderson’s version, the life giving matches represent a glimmer of hope that stays alive in the face of adversity; through Lachenmann’s prism, the tale is a magnifying glass through which to examine social indifference to suffering. Kim examines the symbol of the match from the point of view of the process of transition for a trans person, isolated not only through from society through state sanctioned discrimination, but also often from families who do not embrace their identity. Ethereal sine waves and ominous gong sounds create a chilling, expansive soundscape. Midway through the piece, an accumulating sustained chord glues the events together in an eerie harmonic wash, before the resonance of tolling church bells, a harrowing whistling texture, and a distant song echo across the stereo field.

stations (palimpsest) for string quartet creates a layered composition from sketches for a collage work for quartet that include fragments of Beethoven scores and an augmented field recording made at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York. Kim uses the layered technique as a way to comment upon the use of classical music in urban public spaces. Kim uses a range of timbral effects to extract maximal expressivity from the gestural vocabulary of the ensemble. Non-pitched techniques are a frequent expressive device, as if a voice is struggling to be heard through friction, resistance, and din.

The final work in the collection, albumleaves, features Kim’s performance on piano. The piece was written for her grandmother and features quotes of ten pieces that were included in a piano score collection of hers. Mixed with these quotes are references to an earlier piano work of Kim’s, Elegy, and chords derived from an analysis of church bells in Chautauqua, New York. Watery opening chords split between the high and middle register establish a sensual frame. Fragments of Mussourgsky’s Pictures at the Exhibition are splashed with brilliant harmonic color. Here the echoes of past repertoire are presented with fewer sharp edges, integrated into an unfolding, almost improvisatory texture, as if they are memories flickering across our radar, passing through and interacting with an ongoing present consciousness. The result is an intimate finish to an already personal album, a collection that speaks to Clara Kim’s depth as an artist to encapsulate her experience in her music in a way that speaks universally.

- Dan Lippel