Transcript
LAZOU: Our guest today is Er-Gene Kahng. Er-Gene is a Korean American violinist and college professor who lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas. As an immigrant, she was always interested in assimilation as a survival strategy until she discovered Florence Price, the first Black American woman composer whose compositions were performed by major symphony orchestras.
Since then, Er-Gene has championed Price’s music and continues to investigate ways in which classical music can participate in global conversations about diversity, social justice, and equity. Thank you so much for being here today, Er-Gene.
Er-Gene Kahng: Thank you so much. Really excited to be here.
LAZOU: You said you’re an immigrant. How old were you when you moved to the US and what was that like? Was it culture shock?
Er-Gene Kahng: Sure. I actually moved to Milwaukee when I was two, but I was born in Seoul, South Korea. But Our time in Milwaukee was supposed to be temporary, so we spent four years there, moved back to Korea, and then I officially, and I say officially because it was with intention to immigrate to LA when I was nine years old. I already had part of my dad’s family living in LA and so that to me feels like the official immigration age. Although on paper, you know, I had some time early on in childhood, from two to six in milwaukee.
LAZOU: How different was it, for the years where you were in Korea versus in the US? Did you feel like there was a huge change in culture around you?
Er-Gene Kahng: Oh, absolutely. I’m a Gen Xer. So Korea in the 1980s was still very much involved in conversations around unification. As a child I didn’t have a refined understanding of these sentiments around unification.
I had some dental issues and so we had to go to Seoul these monthly dental appointments.
Er-Gene Kahng: Remember hating going to the dentist, not because of the drilling and all of that, but because to get to the dentist, we had to walk on University’s campus, which was filled with tear gas as students were protesting presence of American troops, and just the Korean War and just how it divided the country.
And there was a very strong sentiment to unify the country at that point in time. Here I am engulfed in what seemed like this political turmoil and the educational system at the time. it was very regimented and um, in some ways very scary for me as, someone going back to a system that I had never really grown up with, being in Milwaukee I do remember going to preschool and kindergarten in Milwaukee and that being a really enjoyable, fun, social experience.
I attended private schools because that’s considered the premier education in Korea. At the time, just a lot of homework. The strict level the high intensity and the pressure with the educational system is felt very much from a young age.
we had school on Saturdays, which was new to me because obviously in America
Saturday is a rest day and there was just intense amounts of homework kind of what people imagine with standardized testing like
Princeton Review or any of these sorts of tutoring services that some
students might be involved in at different points in their lives. A lot of Korean students already have that at the age of six. So they have regular school and then after that they have the afterschool school, which is supposed to already help you with college entrance exams. So this might sound a bit crazy. And again, if you’re already sort of up on Korean sort of educational systems, it doesn’t sound crazy or, I mean, it may, but it sounds very familiar. So I had a little taste of that going back from Milwaukee, and that to me was a culture shock. So I only mentioned this just to say then when I came back to the States, I had memories of Milwaukee, but I also had the experiences of Korea. And so it was a double culture shock, if that makes sense. Yeah.
And so it was a time of a lot of excitement, I suppose, but also a lot of upheaval. I was just trying to process all of this as a child. I did have wonderful memories in Korea as well. I’m not trying to just paint it as this, turbulent extremely pressurized place. I think that there was also a lot of support and I found friendships actually to be forming very quickly. I found that I was also a little bit of a, source of fascination for a lot of Korean students at that time because it was very rare for Korean students who have had American experiences. Usually it’s the other way around. You hear about Korean students who immigrate to the US but not students who’ve had American experiences return
to Korea.
And so to be even able to speak English was a bit of a novelty at that point.
To actually not be able to speak Korean well was Strange considering how I look. And so I think there was very black and white ideas around culture. If you’re Korean you can only speak Korean.
And so, I enjoyed a little bit of that attention, to be honest. I felt very special. And I think it was also a time when Korea very much had this interesting tension with America. But there was also an aspirational aspect as well in the sense of there were some who obviously were very anti-American, but then many who aspired to be as American as possible.
And so to have this Korean kid come in and speak English, I obviously had no idea what was going on, but all the parents, I think in some ways were also somewhat pressuring their children to be friends with me and, find out more about America in some way.
And so I, I definitely enjoyed a little bit of that attention for sure.
LAZOU: Yeah, this sounds very familiar to me because
I actually was born in Canada and then I moved back to where my parents are from, which is Mauritius, a tiny island east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean.
So I grew up, being told, oh, you’re Canadian. And that felt like it was so much better than being Ian , and so I can definitely relate to that part where you feel a little special. You don’t really know why, but somehow it’s supposed to be cool
And I also have had many, many, many experiences where people come up to me and expect that I speak an Asian language and I
Er-Gene Kahng: . Mm. mm-Hmm. . Right, right. Exactly.
LAZOU: like, sorry, I’m a disappointment in that
Er-Gene Kahng: It’s just so interesting the kinds of expectations we place on people, upon just looking at them and, and then in some ways, maybe from my perspective, the surprise of, oh, I don’t know exactly the entire specific inner dialogue, but you can just sense sometimes from some people, for example, they might think, oh, you speak English without an accent that I didn’t expect that you know, or maybe what your experience of, oh, you don’t, you don’t speak an Asian language.
Oh I didn’t expect that
LAZOU: Yeah. It’s funny.
So you mentioned . Feeling the need to assimilate
Er-Gene Kahng: Mm-hmm. This sort of survival strategy. What was going on around you that made you feel that way?
We always have this instinct to belong and to find their tribe and to feel like, yes, these are my people. And I think maybe for a lot of children this is magnified and possibly maybe for my personality and maybe my life experiences, having moved around a lot, experiencing some amount of destabilization, just seeking that stability got conflated with fitting in and assimilating. And I do think culturally, again, in this backdrop of the eighties where there was still this aspirational American kind pedestal that was My experience in Korea, the assimilation was also aspirational of proximity to whiteness, for example and, and just already feeling like I had that leg up because I was exposed to English early on. And so I had the capacity to speak the language without an accent, without the trace of my immigrant background seemed like a special power. so I think it, it really me goes back to this, chase and this journey for freedom, for self-expression, for belonging. And I think as a child it gets expressed in some ways very mundane ways. I remember when I first got enrolled in my elementary school, I was only one of two Asian students, east Asian students. And the other East Asian student was a boy. So of course I wasn’t gonna talk to him and we weren’t gonna be friends. And the the, children without a filter immediately pointing to, you know, why, why do you dress that way? And this was again, late eighties with tie dye shirts denim skirts, scrunchies. And I don’t know, Korea was just not in that place fashion wise. Having come from private school, we had uniforms.
Er-Gene Kahng: And so not having uniforms, it’s not that my parents didn’t know how to dress me or that I didn’t have ideas about fashion, but it’s also just, tie dye and denim was just not it in, you know, late eighties Korea. I was wearing corduroy pants and my parents insisted that I had to tuck it in, and that was just decidedly uncool to tuck in your T-shirt into your pants. And my parents were really fans of Velcro shoes. They were saying well, children always, you know, trip and fall on laces, and then you always have to tie them all the time. So Velcro’s just so much more efficient. Again these mundane little details get magnified when you’re a child and you think, oh my gosh I’m wearing an alien outfit I’m sticking out and people don’t know corduroy and immediately I remember looking around panicked that I didn’t look like everybody else from my clothes and immediately um, untucking my shirt
feeling like, okay, well I can’t change my clothes, but at least I can do that you know, um, maybe like that’s like 10% better. I came home with my shirt untucked. And my parents immediately thought, you’re looking like a slob. What’s going on? What and so I think the tension of with a lot of, IM immigrant children, trying to navigate sort of Korean culture in my case, and then American culture and the role of being a translator in some ways,
and also trying to fit in with my parents and then fit in with my new friends and fit in with this new culture. So sort of the role of the chameleon, right? And it’s so easy to lose yourself as you try to use compass of acceptance through other people. and it becomes something very habitual and familial until Maybe you have a moment to take internal stock and sort of ask, well, who am I in all of this and why am I doing this and
how do I feel about doing all of this?
LAZOU: So when do you move to Arkansas? Was that different from la.
Er-Gene Kahng: Obviously Arkansas was not on my radar. I don’t have any family here. They all are still in California. but as a musician, we’re quite nomadic and monastic, I would say. And I think academics traditionally are also pretty monastic in the sense that, you know, name your, most remote city in your mind, you go where the job is.
you can write and think and present and write books and, anywhere.
And in some ways, maybe it’s even better to be in a slightly less urban area so that you’re in a place that’s conducive to some introspective thought and not the daily stress of urban living. I moved from Chicago big cities were very familiar to me. And so the first thing of course that caught me was just being in a small college town. I didn’t necessarily know what to expect being in the south. And certainly as a coastal person, I had horrible assumptions about race relations and maybe just provincial living and depending on who you talk to and depending on your lens and your statistic, it’s not untrue. But this idea maybe of just people with rifles on their porches like shooting down raccoons or something, that’s not true. There are parts of it that may be, but that’s also partially true also in parts of California, for example.
And some people might laugh at this, but some Arkansans actually don’t consider themselves at least this northwest Arkansas corner to be south because it’s so mountainous. You’ll find a lot of people, for example, don’t have a, a typical southern drawl. They consider themselves more Midwestern. But I would say, moving to Arkansas is more than just The line moving to Arkansas, I think it meant moving to a place that was unfamiliar. It also represented the transition from being a graduate student to being a professional. it also meant moving to a role in which the arts, for example, was not gonna exist in the way that was familiar to me, regardless of whether it was the south or not.
This could happen in any small town, in any state. But I did find for example, that people just had more time to consider others, which was never my experience. It took me a while to realize that I sought a lot of comfort in urban anonymity. I went to UCLA for my undergrad, which, has its own zip code. I don’t know what the numbers are now in terms of population of students, but, there are people who say that they’ve gone to UCLA the same years that I have, and I’ve never met them, which was not gonna
be a surprise for anyone who knows. And so a lot of people find that to be a minus oh well, there’s no sense of community. But I found safety and comfort in that Somehow. I just felt like . I could just take in what I wanted. And then there was no responsibility of community. Which I think most people, when they seek community, they think of the support, the love the help when you need it, people knowing you by your life story, all of the things that make you feel seen. But then there’s also the aspect of being there for others, which because I sought so much comfort in that urban anonymous experience. I didn’t really know what it meant to participate in a community fully.
I knew how to take things that I needed, but I didn’t know how to give back. So learning how to give back is something that I’m continuing to learn and something that immediately struck me moving here as initially very stressful, but somehow it became part of my southern experience.
LAZOU: Yeah. We had another guest in the last season who had a similar experience where she was in a small town in Canada and then moved to the bigger city. And she said, in the small town, everybody knows everybody. And, there is that sense of community. You all know each other. You have to get along with each other. She said that in the big city is where she started. experiencing racism.
Er-Gene Kahng: Yes. Racism, of course exists everywhere. There are different manifestations of it and obviously different severities of experiences from different perpetrators. But I would say that the smaller town, knowing everybody the racism is different. It feels different.
I found myself thinking more about my immigrant experiences and being Asian and what does it mean to adopt this hyphenation of Korean American and all the problems with that and of specificities of it of course, during 2020. And I found a lot of people calling me during that time, of interested in Number one, I think providing support, but also just extending curiosity and checking up on me, which, as someone who, up until even 2020, was so invested in fitting in and disappearing for safety and for this reverse sense of belonging. I feel like I belong if nobody notices that I’m there,
LAZOU: Like not sticking out.
Er-Gene Kahng: Yeah. Not sticking out. That’s my belonging. And so to have all this attention, because I’m Asian was a complex feeling. On the one hand well, thank you for thinking of me.
But then on the other hand, oh, okay, so now you’re seeing me as an Asian friend, not just your violinist friend, for example and, and how do I feel about that? So it is just a complex series of emotions. But I will say for myself, I did not feel the heightened level of anxiety that at least in the papers I seem to read about, and of course all of the attacks that were happening all across the country. I did not experience that in this small corner. Of course, I wasn’t out exploring, but I did not feel fearful at the time to go to grocery stores with the mask for being Asian. There were times when I felt some of the questions that I received from very well-intentioned individuals to be leading in the sense that I felt slightly pressured to provide some sensational story of having been attacked or feeling physically threatened because I’m in the south, and of course everyone in the south is supposed to be backwards and provincial and savage. And and yet, this is also not an area that is not without its problems either. And so I think with any place we live, just trying to take on a realistic picture of where things are, I find is ever changing, but also difficult because the lens that I encompass, that I see myself in is constantly changing.
LAZOU: Yeah. It’s so interesting because I was in downtown LA somebody I think from the LA Times wrote an article about being attacked and he lived like the street from me
Er-Gene Kahng: mm
LAZOU: The grocery store where I went grocery shopping. Some woman got spat at in her face for being Asian.
And it’s so interesting the stereotypes that we have for quote unquote progressive cities like Los Angeles
Er-Gene Kahng: Yes.
LAZOU: Arkansas, and how anecdotal evidence is very different.
Er-Gene Kahng: Oh, yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. And to be fair, it also opened up my own eyes because if I sound like I’m defending and supporting Arkansas, or at least Fayetteville, you know, I mean, yes. I mean, just because I need to reflect the reality of my own lived experience during that time, which did not include the things that I was reading about in the papers.
But on the other hand, I’m also not saying that it’s not a city without its own problems. I miss the diversity in the most I guess numbers oriented manifestation of the word diversity, you know, how many different ethnic groups reside in a, X amount of square footage. I do miss a little bit of that diversity that I became so familiar with in LA and my time in large cities. I also spent some time in London, which I think is over 50% immigrants, so there’s always this very foundational question of what is the identity of London? Or what is the identity of la? small towns also go through the same growing pains and the same questions of identity. Every few years. lived here, I’m starting my 17th year. at the university, I’ve seen this small town evolve quite a bit in every facet.
Er-Gene Kahng: You talk about housing, you talk about demography, you talk about values. And specifically with the arts, it’s been really interesting to see that when I first came here, I felt a sense of artistic isolation because, for example, there’s no ballet company, there’s no opera company. The things that I’m used to being able to access hundreds of concerts of any kind of musical genre. If there are some art house films, you I’m accustomed to it visiting the city that I would be living in. Not having that cultural access was definitely very isolating. And to now be told well, you’re at the university, so you’re the culture. I mean, in a way it’s empowering, but at the same time, every artist, everyone needs a community to refine and to evolve ideas to fuel creativity. All ideas come from other ideas and so this encapsulated idea, think tank being at the university was something that was very difficult for me. And yet now, almost 20 years later, I see my own town going through, similar questions of is there culture beyond the ivory tower?
Of course there is. Well, well, who is that going to be and how do we foster that? And, And also I would say the secondary element that has been very interesting, which kind of parallels maybe my own journey as well as an artist, is the idea of aspiration and of excellence. I say that in quotations. So many Arkansans, who aspire to be “elite” would use their cultural gauge by viewing cities like LA or New York, Chicago, what are the trends there and how can we bring that to Arkansas? And so there were a lot of artists and culture that was parachuted into the region, but then the cultural community impact of that would be very temporary, right?
Because they come in, they do their thing and then they leave. And so at a certain point it seemed that a lot of the arts organizations were interested in lasting impact of artists who could basically live and work here and speak to the issues that Arkansans who live here deal with, not just what’s happening in New York.
LAZOU: Bring us back to when you found out about Florence Price what that did for you.
Er-Gene Kahng: I found out about Florence Price probably like year two of my job, 2008, 2009, I had a couple of historian friends, library friends, journalism friends, music history friends who had been living in the area. And Florence Price is someone who many people have been talking about. Historians have been writing about her since the seventies. She passed away in early 1950s so her legacy on written record has been ongoing.
But many of her manuscript papers for string music was lost at that moment. When you think about history, so much of it depends on artifacts that are physical. Even oral tradition, I think a performer, a classical musician is not as useful. So for us, it really comes down to where’s the sheet music?
Having gone through all my advanced degrees I, I have sometimes this delusion that I know all of the important parts of music history, especially because it’s historical and it’s not constantly evolving and being created. I fall into this delusion that history is fixed. These things happened at x time, you know, in 1900 these things happened, and that’s not gonna change. So when my friend started talking about Florence Price, it really irritated me that I didn’t know about her as a classical music figure because with all my advanced degrees I, I know all that I need to know about these historical figures, right? And that’s how it started, was just something as mundane as that is who is this person and why are five or six people talking about it?
I started asking more questions and, it started to grow, organically. My colleagues at the university also program an annual Black music symposium. One year she was going to be the single Black artist that was going to be featured. And so, across the week historians, performers, librarians, journalists all came together talk about Florence Price’s many different lenses. She was not just a musician, right? Not just a composer. And I can talk in as much detail as you would like, but I would say the genesis of all of this was just simple curiosity. And I think the opportunity to get to know her was very much contingent on the fact that she’s an Arkansan figure. And so my interest was very much rooted in regional history.
LAZOU: Yeah. So when you decided to pursue music what was your family’s reaction to that?
Er-Gene Kahng: My parents are not musicians, but they’re also not maybe what a lot of Asian parents or immigrant parents might experience, which is to go for the white collar professional jobs. So they were very supportive. They were concerned like all parents would be, even if I did go to medical school or something, you know. but I did not get pushback on it, and I was not discouraged. yeah, but for me, I think it also made me from a very early age feel like I was all on my own, you know? If I quote failed, it was on me. And that’s the other side of the coin that maybe other people don’t think about as much. I think we’re, as an Asian immigrant group, oftentimes more invested in the narrative of extreme pressure over-scheduling children and over defining the narratives of success. But I wonder, what listeners may feel about on the other side, which is also equally challenging, right? Which is if you leave a child to his or her own devices and say well, I don’t know anything about music, you’re kind of on your own. I don’t know. It’s also very tough in in a different way.
LAZOU: Yeah. . either you have very limited choice or you have so many choices that you don’t know what to do with
Er-Gene Kahng: exactly. Exactly. And, I think about that being the parallel sort of philosophy of my parents. I think, I went to a magnet school, which I mean, again, in Korea there are no such things as magnet schools. At least in the eighties there, there wasn’t. And all of my friends in elementary school were gonna go to this one school, which again, I don’t, didn’t know if it operated by a lottery system but they all talked about it because their parents had, all gotten together and said that they that this the best school in the, inner city district. my parents didn’t know anything. And so it was the same thing. They said just talk to your friends and do what they do.
And, And so I think the whole idea of assimilation also was very much a familiar tool because if you don’t know, you just go with the crowd, right?
It exists on so many levels, which makes it so deep rooted. You know, It’s not simply just about an individual wanting to belong or feeling scared about sticking out. I think there are just a lot of systemic, things as well. And so I ended up going to the school simply because my parents didn’t have information about how the school districts worked in LA and uh, being invested in public education.
Like how all of it worked. They had to build from the ground up.
LAZOU: I’m always surprised when I learn about how the American school system works too. ’cause it sounds so complicated.
’cause where I grew up, it was mostly, public schools and then there were some Catholic schools, but very few private schools. So only the really rich kids would go to private schools.
Everybody else would just go to public school and you’d go to one that was close to you, .
Er-Gene Kahng: Exactly.
LAZOU: more complicated here.
Er-Gene Kahng: Exactly. Exactly.
LAZOU: You mentioned how in 2020 you started to feel that change of, people calling you and checking up on you and, what does that mean in terms of your identity and your identity relative to them? Would you say that you’re more claiming your Asian identity now, or like where are you with that?
Er-Gene Kahng: Oh, for sure. I I was always proud of being Korean. I don’t know if that’s the best descriptor. I don’t think I was displaying my pride in some overt way, but I was also not trying to hide it. to what extent someone could just be quote, neutral about being Korean, I think I was that, I wasn’t ashamed of it. I wasn’t trying to hide it. I wasn’t thinking, oh, wouldn’t it be great if in some magical world I could be a different race and it wouldn’t be Korean? I was also, you know, predominantly white institution practicing, dead white European composers, revering them as the gold standard of culture and of deep truths in music.
And of course, I was also involved in this art form that is highly elitist. Any instrument of Any worth, is already in the six figures. Forget the luxury car what you want is the antique violin and the antique french bow, which could cost more than a house you know, depending, because at a certain point you’re, you’re purchasing a work of art, right?
It’s not just a tool. And so all of the things that you might imagine that happen in a visual art market, you know, when people are trying to buy paintings and someone says, oh, well my five-year-old could have painted that, or whatever, and then people are paying $50 million for it. I mean, Some of that kind of also gets incorporated into the instrument market, although it’s slightly different, but it’s also the same. So you’ve got the professional narrative and then you’ve got the narrative of what it means to be involved in that. By an early age you have to grow up really fast, and then there’s just where I am, right?
And what I do. And so all of that being predominantly white, I think, there’s that tension of well, I am who I am, but then all of my education is geared toward this narrative, right? And for example, even growing up in California, I didn’t really know any significant Asian American historical figures.
If we ever talked about it, it was maybe like one class period, which might only be 50 minutes, but then even out of the 50 minute class period, maybe it’s like 30 minutes. ’cause then for the other 20, you have to talk about something else, so I think public education curricula at the time, for example, did not really emphasize the role of Immigrants in building American culture, then of course, I wasn’t getting any of that in my violin lessons when the violin is Italian and, I’m playing all this German music. We’re not gonna be talking about China, you know, at that, point. So all of that, just to say, I think my identity pre 2020 was by default non-Asian
because of everything that I do. it wasn’t that I was avoiding it, I just didn’t think about it. And 2020, when the world pressed the pause button for many reasons, it afforded me some time to really reflect, like many of us have talked about in the pandemic as a time of really consolidating one’s values. And also maybe because of my experiences up to that point, having a larger sample from which to then examine. What is it I have become and how do I wanna move forward?
Of course, the rise of Asian hate crimes also placed a very direct lens on me being Asian. I when all of the headlines were talking about George Floyd, I had very clear flashbacks to Rodney King. The LA riots for me was a very formative time in my life where I first started thinking about race relations. even though it encompassed maybe almost a decade, the OJ Simpson trial Koreatown at the time, housing wise the two big racial groups were um, Korean and Black. Residents and culturally speaking, at that time there was just so much tension because the stereotypical default cultural language is very different. So I remember thinking to myself as a Korean American who was going to a public school with predominantly Black and brown students, I understood where the cultural misunderstandings would lie. But seeing a lot of an older generation of Korean immigrants living in Koreatown who never really had to assimilate in a way because of critical mass getting into these cultural conflicts for reasons that for me were just if they just knew a little bit more about something beyond Korean culture, it could be a conflict that could be avoided. For example, Latasha Harlin’s, a Korean liquor store owner shot this 15-year-old girl because there was a misunderstanding about whether she was shoplifting a carton of orange juice or not.
I remember so much uproar, anti Korean sentiment, and feeling such shame, thinking to myself, I know I wasn’t responsible for this, but I feel like I am in some way.
I’ve remembered all of those unresolved feelings that in a way I never really had a chance to process as a teenager, but now come 2020 again, police brutality, And thinking, oh my gosh, this is what people are talking about when they talk about history repeating. I would say it’s a very deeply introspective time for me. And yes, I do claim being Korean and Korean American in a way I hadn’t before, but I would say it’s because I’m trying to be more intentional about that as opposed to before where it wasn’t a shame or a hiding or a denial, it was just, I feel like I was sleepwalking through life. 2020 was kind of an awakening for me.
LAZOU: As it was for most of us.
Er-Gene Kahng: Right, right. Exactly.
LAZOU: Even before 2020, with your focus on Florence Price’s music, it seems to me that you’re very keen on using music as a way to bring awareness to social issues.
How important is it for there to be a mission behind the music you play?
Er-Gene Kahng: I don’t think every musician needs to be what people sometimes now call, like artivists, you know, art activators or art protestors or activists. However, it’s an interest of mine just because I still have a need to resolve the question, which continues to remain unresolved for me, which is, I love music. I love having a connection to history. I love European history and all of the things that have been so problematic with colonialism and imperialism. I mean, I don’t love that, but I, I’m not trying to erase any of the ugly parts of it. I embrace that as part of the problematic historical narrative, which even if I’m not promoting it, I’m valuing the music by continuing to perform it. But then I also think about all of the underrepresented figures that have been lost or erased silenced or devalued. I think part of it is just trying to develop a more accurate picture of reality. Art sometimes is very good at over romanticizing. Especially older historical art forms are really great at being deceptively nostalgic, meaning, oh, wasn’t it so great in the olden days times were more simple and people all got along. It’s also really great at highlighting beautiful moments at the expense of the ugly ones because people wanna live sometimes in a fantasy world where they can escape all of the problems, right? It can be a drug in that way. It can be a therapy, but it can also be a drug. And so I understand its power. I understand by being a classical musician, the problems that come with it, I also enjoy being involved in an older art form. I just really love the language of it. But I also love contemporary musical forms as well, and I don’t wanna live in the past. And I think that sometimes when we are involved in super old art forms, you know, I’m not gonna walk around with a powdered wig and think that I’m a troubadour, i. I live in the contemporary world, and I wanna be able to be an active community participant in the real world. And that has been one of the many things that I continue to question for myself, which is do I continue to contribute to this world by still seeping myself in an older language, which hearkens back to a world that no longer really exists. If I’m playing music from 1600, we have sprung from that world, but we’re not in 1600. know, what does that mean for me? Not every musician needs to be at that nexus, but I want to. I always felt that I wanted classical musicians to be more public intellectuals. And obviously that’s maybe not our role, but I wondered, Surely musicians have something that they can contribute to current discussions about issues of their passion, of their choosing. It doesn’t have to be social justice. Um, And yet a lot of people will say well, but that’s why you’re a musician. You speak through your music. Right? I think it’s complicated by the fact that performers are interpretive artists. We have to interpret other people’s music. So there’s always a different lens and sometimes our creative scope is a lot more limited because of that. I think all artists question and quest for ” what for me represents the truth” and recognizing that art has the capacity to deceive and to be a magnifying glass to reality in a way that maybe words. I can’t I don’t know. So that’s always been an interest, but I also am constantly aware of the limitations.
LAZOU: Yeah. It’s an interesting place to be in the classical music world specifically because you’re limited by the repertoire that you’re playing. We were talking earlier about the tension between preserving your culture and like pushing forward and, and I feel like classical music is the same thing, where you’re trying to preserve this beautiful music and the beautiful parts of that culture around it. But also how do you bring that forward into the current moment and add your own lens to it,
Er-Gene Kahng: Right. The other missing piece too is all artists need an audience. And it’s great if, I guess somebody has a great idea, but if there’s no audience and there isn’t a critical mass, the idea will die in isolation. And so I remember when I applied for funding to record Florence Price’s concertos, maybe this is a little bit nitty gritty, but it’s pertinent to this idea of narrative is all of the existing arts funding that I could find, that I could apply for was not interested in what people now, put under the umbrella of DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion. and I’m not even sure that’s what I was trying to do, but maybe if I were to apply for grants now there’d be tons of DEI related grants.
And a project like preserving and or championing Florence Price would be People would be fighting over who would be the one to say, yes, I funded this project. So the recording was published in 2018, but obviously all of the applications for grants and the, all of that started way earlier, I would say around 2011. No one at that time was talking in the arts about DEI, I think the big thing around that time was about entrepreneurialism
LAZOU: the startup culture.
Er-Gene Kahng: yeah, startup culture, that was the big topic culturally.
And so, you know, I am saying well, well sir madam, like I would really love to bring this underrepresented Black American female woman composer to light. She’s Arkansan, but she had, prominence in Chicago. She has an amazing sound world. She has an amazing story. And I felt like I really had to somehow fit that in with. Basically startup culture, which I mean, has nothing to do with that, and I don’t know if listeners also have this uh, interesting jigsaw puzzle of wanting to bring light to an idea that is not of cultural currency yet or ever, and having to fit that into the dominant cultural narrative of the time. And so as you can imagine, a lot of my forced feeding of Florence Price into, let’s just say startup culture um, it didn’t work but I tried, I tried like she was a trailblazer. She was a pioneer. She was a startup person from the 1890s, and it did not work. And so I put in a lot of my own funds to make it work. And I did have some university backing. And if any arts organization or artists have any sour, bitter feelings about the ivory tower being really elitist and conservative, there are moments like this where it can still be a place of innovation, which I think ideally that’s like the Hallmark card version of what higher ed does, right? It’s, it can be an incubator of original, innovative, cutting edge ideas. And I would say my own university, again, a Southern university, had so much interest in this and they were probably my number one supporters for this idea when nationally no one was interested in this idea. So I remained forever grateful and. And now people are talking about Florence Price, but it’s like after the fact. I mean, I’m not saying that as a I got you now or, I, I told you or whatever.
It’s not that. But it’s just so much of these ideas I find troubling because we fall prey to trends,
LAZOU: Yeah, right now it fits very well with the cultural moment that we are in
Er-Gene Kahng: Which is so problematic too, because then is it just a trend? Is it gonna pass us by?
LAZOU: Yeah. Know that a while back. In classical music, they’ve started doing blind auditions
to
Try and get better representation
in
Orchestras.
Er-Gene Kahng: Mm-Hmm.
LAZOU: So do you feel like in classical music Asians are well represented and of treated equally? Or do you still feel like there are systemic ways in which, not necessarily just Asians, but minorities are still discriminated against?
Whether it’s pay scale or, other things?
Er-Gene Kahng: any of your listeners who have taken classical violin lessons, I’ll just use violin as an example because I’m a violinist, will probably find this particular question interesting because I find in classical music, female Asian violinists to be the majority of the classical performing field. And so when you’re talking about ethnic minorities in higher ed or gender divisions in higher ed, we’re entering a very different discussion when we’re talking about the orchestral world. I don’t obviously have statistics on hand, but from my own experiences, I’m very accustomed to female Asian violinists being the dominant sort of ethnic gender group in any studio. it’s kind of like maybe designers or chefs, like maybe women are expected to cook in the kitchen, but not many are like, the chefs that are revered. Maybe, you women are the bigger consumers of fashion. But then still, men are considered the more innovative designers the high fashion world. I find that, female violin performers are probably a dominant group. How many are female and also Asian? I’m not sure, but it’s certainly not I don’t feel like it’s necessarily a minority
which causes interesting splits in the narrative of equity and diversity and blind auditions actually are quite classic in the sense that, I don’t know when they were instituted, but I wanna say it’s, it’s been a long time.
LAZOU: Yeah.
Er-Gene Kahng: And, then the whole thing of telling female students not to wear heels, but now they put carpet. So the stage of course is not carpeted. It’s, surface, but the pathway to which an applicant or a candidate will walk behind the curtain is carpeted. But, you know, this may not surprise you. I feel like as a musician I can still tell women tend to be shorter they tend to weigh less. And so when you hear the gaits like the footsteps. You can at least tell if this person is lighter or heavier or longer lagged or shorter lagged. Women’s hands tend to be a little bit smaller on average, and so that presents a very different setup. And again, that, that may be very controversial opinion, but at least I’m not necessarily talking about gender, I’m talking about body mass and so I feel like you can hear the difference, let’s say in body mass and some of that can get gendered, obviously not all the time. They’re very, tall women and you know, they’re very short men and all that.
Anyway, all of that to say, I think the more contemporary discussions around equity are around access because violin lessons are so expensive and it takes so many years of training. Oftentimes by the time you get to an audition, you won’t have many candidates who didn’t have the financial access to private lessons already from childhood. So much of performing is also about absorbing the style. And so maybe a lot of our access through the Internet of performances has been helpful in kkind of bridging that access. But we also are talking about the digital divide, people who don’t have actually access to the internet. And, so by the time a candidate is 18, sure they’re really young, but years of not having that access compounded creates very much a divide. And so by the time we talk about orchestral auditions, in some ways it’s too late. I think it needs to start way earlier. But obviously orchestra should also be talking about that as well. But some of the more contemporary conversations have been around changing some of the orchestral excerpts that are asked, for example, some have worked with organizations that are talking about the, um, equivalent of affirmative action that we were talking about decades ago with higher ed, which is do we want to as an organization have x percentage of diverse candidates house you know, an orchestra, which is very controversial obviously for lots of different reasons. Just in the same way that affirmative action created a lot of dialogue university admissions. so it’s definitely an ongoing conversation, blind auditions being one of them, but it’s like many things,
multifaceted,
LAZOU: Yeah, for sure. before we move on to the next part, I wanted to ask what’s next for you? What are you currently excited about?
Er-Gene Kahng: To be completely frank, I have been spending the last few years still performing and talking about Florence Price with a lot of orchestras and universities and arts organizations. And I feel like that chapter for me is coming to a close, even though the conversations around Florence price are growing and so I’m, currently in my thinking phase. I’m thinking about how to expand on my interests, which are continuing to grow, for example, not to be at, locust of one person, right? Florence Price is not the only vehicle. to talk about Florence Price’s biography, to talk about Arkansas, to talk about DEI, to talk about Decolonizing the classroom. But it was amazing how one person could be that for me for so many years. So I’m in the process of trying to, pick up some of the things that Florence Prices afforded me to expand upon, issues. But then to think about what does this mean, for example, for my teaching? What does this mean for my future programming? On a day-to-Day basis, not much has changed. You I teach my classes. my administrative work. I perform concerts. But in my mind, I am, thinking about new projects on the horizon. none of which, are in existence at the moment. But I’m excited for what may come my way.
LAZOU: Yeah. So you’re currently exploring is what
Er-Gene Kahng: I’m currently exploring exactly exploring in the most vague sense.
LAZOU: necessary step
Er-Gene Kahng: Yes, exactly. Exactly.
LAZOU: I like to end this with rapid fire questions. These are one word or one phrase answers. You don’t have to explain, but you can if you want to.
First is, what’s an Asian food that you should like, but don’t?
Er-Gene Kahng: Oh, I wasn’t expecting that. I I thought you were gonna say what my favorite one is. Oh man. I don’t know if I should like it, but I don’t know if some of the Korean listeners might know Sea urchin. I mean, it’s considered delicacy. I could take it or leave it. I don’t hate it, but I feel like I should like it, Yeah..
LAZOU: What’s an Asian food that you’ll never get tired of?
Er-Gene Kahng: Oh gosh. Probably, so Doenjang, which is Doenjang Jjigae, which most people wouldn’t know it as Miso, but miso is the Japanese version, so soybean soup.
LAZOU: Okay. What’s a piece that people want you to play at a party that you really hate playing?
Er-Gene Kahng: Oh, most people want me to play contemporary pop songs. So like Taylor Swift was one that re and I was like, oh my gosh. I am actually not well versed. I try to have a stance on pop culture, like a thumb and pop culture, but I actually don’t know Taylor Swift songs as well as I guess I should.
I, and I see, I can’t even remember the song that they wanted me to play ’cause didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was Taylor Swift, but I, it’s like the female pop artist of the time, like a couple of years ago. It was like Britney Spears. So yeah, I would say most people at parties want me to play pop songs, but just like the melody on violin. And if I can have a second part, the devil went down to Georgia is like fiddle tune. Like a lot of southerners like fiddle culture, as you can imagine, is really big here. But again, being a classical musician, that was just not my narrative.
Even though I play the fiddle I play violin. So it’ll be a mixture depending on where, which party you’re talking about. About fiddle tunes or pop female artists.
LAZOU: All right. Who’s inspiring you as a musician right now? another musician that you’re, that enjoying their work right now?
Er-Gene Kahng: So many really, I’ll just say Randall Goosby right now because he’s been on my mind ’cause he just released a Florence Price album, I think actually last year. But it just still feels very contemporary. But, you know, really young artist and I don’t mean that in sort of any kind of pejorative way.
He he’s in his twenties, so he’s very young. But so mature and amazing and I just love how he’s embraced his Black and Korean roots. And that’s something that I really admire across the board, I would say with a lot of young artists because as I say, I was just sleepwalking during that time.
I was probably just thinking about, do I have enough money to buy a pizza slice you know? So many of these Gen Z musicians now are really claiming their ethnic cultural identity in ways that I just was not on that radar. So he’s an example of someone I really admire.
LAZOU: And lastly, what’s your favorite venue that you’ve played at?
Er-Gene Kahng: so again, this is gonna sound super elitist, but I performed in Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw oh gosh, in 2019. if anyone wants to Google this concert hall, it has two staircases that literally feel like they’re going up to the ceiling and it’s in red velvet carpet. Growing up in America, I think all European structures are immediately so gorgeous because they’re so historical, the architecture tended towards grandness and we just don’t have that as much here.
So I would say that was probably my most amazing venue.
LAZOU: Awesome. Thank you so much for doing this, this was so much fun.
Er-Gene Kahng: Thank you so much.
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