This interview was conducted by Nicholas Tran. The interview was edited for style and clarity

Nicholas Tran: Hi Paul! How are you? How is teaching, and are you doing okay with the pandemic? 

Paul Salerni: I’m doing okay. One of the upsides of Sibelius right now is that in theory class, students can open their Sibelius files, and I can give them comments. Of course, Sibelius playback can lead to composers writing unidiomatically for instruments. It’s a constant fight. 

I’m comfortable at home. I’ve written a ton of music during quarantine. In order to get music heard, I have learned how to use Logic and Final Cut Pro. Old people can learn—that’s okay!

NT: I guess those are good silver linings that have come out of the pandemic!

PS: On the other hand, you know, both of my sons are professional musicians. One of my sons is the violinist in the Attacca Quartet and the many tours that they would have had were canceled. I also really miss having my students. 

NT: Us musicians are definitely are facing a hard time.

PS: What about you? Where are you in your career? 

NT: I just graduated from the Boston Conservatory in December. I joke that I got out just in time since none of my classes had to be online! Right now, I’m preparing some grad school applications. Fortunately, I’ve been able to write music during the pandemic. I won the National Sawdust New Works Commission in August, actually.

PS: That’s wonderful! 

NT: So, you studied with Earl Kim at Harvard. How was he as a teacher? What memories do you have of him? 

PS: It’s a little bit of a complicated question. Of all of his students of a certain generation, I was the closest to him. I considered him a dad, and he considered me a son. It’s now difficult for me to separate my feelings about him as a friend and as a teacher. 

As a teacher—I came from Amherst, where the two composition teachers were constantly there—when I got to Harvard, Earl was in a difficult place in his life, going through a divorce, and wasn’t very present. The second semester I was there, Earl was on sabbatical, and I studied with Arthur Berger instead. Earl was not a very big presence in my life when I got to Harvard.

The first time I played a piece in graduate seminar, he said, “Good.” He went on and on a little bit about one note here and one note there. I come out of the door and all of my fellow graduate students who were older than me came around and started hugging me and said, “Earl said ‘good!’” They were wowed because Earl never said anything! He was a man of great eloquence. Whenever he spoke, it was very eloquent, but he did not speak a lot.

The second year when you’re a graduate student at Harvard, you take your oral exams. Earl was in charge and he said you should only study two pieces: Schoenberg’s Fantasy for Violin and Piano, a serial piece, and the Marriage of Figaro. I didn’t like opera, so this studying of Figaro made me absolutely wild about it. 

In the fourth year I was at Harvard, my buddy and I decided to put on a production of Abduction from the Seraglio, the opera by Mozart, at the Harvard Career House, where we were tutors. Earl came to the production and probably thought to himself, “Okay, this guy can conduct.” The staging was good and was done by this young woman, who eventually became my girlfriend and eventually became my wife. Then, all of a sudden, there was this invitation by Earl to come to the house and an invitation to go out for Chinese food, which was a big deal for Earl. It was clear that Earl wanted me to be part of his inner circle. 

In the long run, I understood his ulterior motive: He was getting ready to do his second evening-long series of Beckett settings called Narratives, and he needed an assistant conductor, someone who could coach, and someone who could play the piano, and someone who was theatre savvy, and the perfect couple.

So, as a teacher, Earl never really said much to me. What I learned from Earl was a set of standards. I was his assistant, so I needed to learn his music. Earl said to me, “Okay, please learn all of these pieces.” I took his piece Eh, Joe and learned it by heart. I played it at the piano; I sang it; everything. He said to me, “Okay, what do you know about Eh, Joe?” I played the entire thing for him from memory, by heart. Earl said, “Oh! Okay.” I think that’s how I actually won the job to conduct it. So, I knew his music very intimately, and I saw how it was made, and saw the kind of precision and continuity he had, and his economy of means. He never said anything like that to you, but he showed you. 

The other thing I learned from him—after every meal, we would sit down and play four-hands or sing Schubert together—and listening to him play, I learned about phrasing and his whole ethos. 

To say Earl was a great direct teacher—never. He would give you bigger, broader detail. I remember I was stuck on the first piece I ever wrote with him. He pointed to one note on the page and said, “That note is static.” I spent two weeks figuring it out and eventually I got it to sound perfect. 

People of an older generation will probably say that Earl was the antipode to Milton Babbitt. Earl was more open to things that were not serial. He was open to things that were directly communicative. When he was at Harvard, he assumed you could figure out the technical stuff and all he had to do was give you his broad critiques. I can’t remember anything really specific he ever said to me. 

NT: I feel like I’ve had relatively similar experiences with some of my past professors, where they would focus on guiding you through finding your own voice through a philosophical approach—less technical.

PS: Well said! That’s the other thing about Earl. He was so open to you expressing your voice. He never criticized on the basis of style, which a lot of other composition teachers do. He did not want you to sound like him—and you couldn’t!

Earl’s style was so idiosyncratic. The actual pitch content was familiar and is similar to Schoenberg, whom he studied with—maybe more tonal. His musical language—the way he used space, different registers, doubling—is so unique to him. 

NT: Definitely. When I first started studying the score for Now and Then, it seemed like some of the ideas he was interested in were sparseness, juxtaposition, and symmetry. Can you tell me a little more about stylistic characteristics of Earl’s works? 

PS: He said there were two revelations that happened to him in the 60s. One was Samuel Beckett. If you think about Beckett, there are never long sentences. Short. Pauses in between. The narratives are never linear, and they are juxtapositional. The text is tragic-comic. He would always try to find the inherent music in the words.

The other thing he talks about is going to the Japanese Rock Garden in the Brooklyn Botanical Museum. He saw each piece separately that seemed disconnected but then moving back from it and seeing it as a whole was very important for him. 

NT: Am I correct in understanding that Earl was one of the few people who got permission to set Beckett works? 

PS: Yes!

NT: I think I read in your article that Now and Then is the first piece that uses non-Beckett works after 16 years.

PS: Yes. He set Chekhov, who was a writer that he admired.

NT: Earl studied with Arnold Schoenberg and Roger Sessions. Did he ever speak to you about those people? 

PS: He also studied with Ernest Bloch! He adored Sessions. When I was a graduate student, Sessions had one of his pieces done in Boston, so we all went out to Chinatown for dinner. Earl rarely went out, but when he did, he liked to go out for Chinese food in Chinatown. 

Sessions was extremely supportive of Earl. When Earl was a graduate student at Berkeley and was teaching there, everybody had to sign a loyalty oath. He didn’t and got fired. Sessions went to teach at Princeton and brought Earl with him. He was very dedicated to Sessions. 

There are very direct connections to Schoenberg in Earl’s music. I actually have one of the great artifacts of Earl’s relationship with Schoenberg. Schoenberg was writing his piano concerto when Earl was studying with him. As a sort of homage to Schoenberg, Earl took Schoenberg’s score and copied it out exactly with pen and ink. I own that score—Arnold Schoenberg’s piano concerto in Earl Kim’s hand! I look at it and think, “Wow, I was never that dedicated to Earl to copy out a score like that!”

NT: That’s incredible. You know, my former professor Marti Epstein would tell me to copy moments—chords, notation, what have you—out of scores that I admired. It was such an interesting way to learn. Anyway, your story about Chinatown is humorous! My family used to drive up the Cape to Chinatown once a month to eat. It was such a treat. 

PS: The Cape! That reminds me of another quick and important influence. In 1990, I did the first Earl Kim festival. At that point, the conductor of the Cape Cod Symphony, Jung-ho Pak, was teaching at LeHigh and was also conducting at this festival. Earl immediately took him under his wing. He was this smart, talented, Korean-American guy. Jung-ho said to me, “This is the first time I have ever met someone who is Korean, born in America, who does what I do—you know, who is a world-class musician. This is such an inspiration. This is great.” 

NT: I resonate with this a lot, as a Vietnamese-American. Representation and diversity are things that we constantly need to address. I know Earl, as many other Asian-Americans, faced prejudice.

PS: Earl never directly talked to me about the prejudice. The only story I have is that he was at an airport and someone went up to him and said, “Hey! You’re Seiji Ozawa!” 

NT: I guess there are worse people to be mistaken for than Ozawa!

NT: Well, before we wrap up, is there anything else you would like to tell me about Earl Kim? 

PS: Well, one of the things we don’t get to discuss enough of is how emotionally valid Earl’s music was. Even when he was writing in this Beckettian, sparse, somewhat distant style, there was always a moment of great passion. I remember when I first heard Earthlight, when the soprano sings the hook, it was so beautiful and lyrical that tears came to my eyes. You can’t understand it. 

Where Grief Slumbers was a piece that got played a lot. My wife’s opera mentor was very conservative. His wife was also very conservative—didn’t like dissonant sounding stuff. She was our friend though and went to see Where Grief Slumbers. After, she called me and said, “I started crying! It was so beautiful!”

There was this great, almost sentimental emotion in his music. When we had the first Earl Kim festival, he wrote a piece called Some Thoughts on Keats and Coleridge, dedicated to Roger Sessions. There was moment in one of the pieces where the text is “/and you have your music too/” and when that moment came, we realized that Earl was honoring his teacher and we in the audience were honoring Earl as our teacher and all of us were weeping. There is this great emotional content in his music. We composers don’t like to talk about it because it’s too corny, but he loved it.

The end of Now and Then! The last movement…

NT: Yes, the last few measures of the ending, with the spiccato viola is so haunting. I remember hearing it live for the first time at rehearsal and the artistic director and I just sat there, stunned in silence. 

Nicholas Tran is a composer and Convergence Ensemble’s previous General Manager. He earned his Bachelor’s of Music in Composition at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee. His collaborators have included the JACK Quartet as part of the National Sawdust 2020 New Works Commission and the Mivos Quartet.