Earl Kim

Earl Kim (1920-1998) was an American composer and teacher, born in Dinuba, California, to Korean immigrant parents. He studied with Arnold Schoenberg at UCLA and with Ernest Bloch and Roger Sessions at Berkeley, and taught for most of his life at Princeton and Harvard. He is known for spare vocal and theatre works, many of them settings of Samuel Beckett. Kim's studies were interrupted by army intelligence service in the Second World War, and he took his M.A. at Berkeley in 1952. He taught at Princeton from 1952 to 1967 and at Harvard from 1967 until 1990.