Listening to Nature
A conversation with violinist/improviser Ariana Kim on attuning our senses to the natural world
By Youa Vang
In the early 90s, a young Korean American girl listened intently and absorbed the music that was shared in her family’s St. Paul home. The sounds that Ariana Kim digested audibly through her parents, that were passed from her maternal and paternal grandparents, informed the role music would play later on in her life—and would allow her to share her views with the rest of the world. Empowered by the Suzuki method taught by her mother, Kim and her younger brother learned music much like any other language. Shortly before her third birthday, Ariana had her first violin lesson, mostly to encourage a love for music, diligence, and a discipline for certain things in life.
Some paths are clearly chosen for us, and others are laid out in front of us, waiting for us to discover. For Ariana, when she became old enough to understand what was happening, she had established a self-awareness and had already fallen in love with music. It became part of her identity, and around the age of five, she knew music would become her chosen path. The only exception was a possible career as a milk delivery person. The only problem is we no longer live in the 1950s. Kim shares via a virtual call from her New York home: “In preschool, I wanted to be a milk truck driver. It was spurred on by Sesame Street. On the show, there was a segment teaching kids about farms, and there was a song in the background about farmers milking cows and delivering the milk to homes. Then you watch the truck driver bring these bottles of milk up to the mom, and she receives and pours milk into a bottle and hands it to the baby. You are going from cow to crib, and I loved children. I've always loved children…so four-year-old me wanted to get those babies fed. So yeah, there was a brief stint where I wanted to be a milk truck driver, but everything else since then has been music.”
After making her debut with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra at 16, she left Minnesota the following year for school at the San Francisco Conservatory for her undergrad and to Juilliard thereafter for her masters and doctorate. Her accolades have added up over the years: receiving the Gold Medal at the 2017 Osaka International Competition with the Aizuri Quartet, the 2018 M-Prize, and a 2019 GRAMMY® nomination for their debut album, Blueprinting, being appointed at 24 as acting concertmaster of the Louisiana Philharmonic in New Orleans, a recipient of a Cornell University Affinito-Stewart Faculty Grant and a Society for the Humanities Grant, becoming an Associate Professor at Cornell University, along with curating a cultural diplomacy public art project involving the Cornell Composition Department, amongst many other achievements.
What Kim didn’t realize is that she would eventually become the person taking care of those young babies—except through music and teaching. She says, “I try to approach everything I do from a place of integrity, and I ask myself, ‘What does this project need from me? What do I need to do in order to communicate it to those that I am serving?’ The work I do doesn't feel necessarily like pressure. To me, it feels like a humble duty. I'm really just like the messenger; I'm the vehicle that allows me to share this craft with others, whether it be students, or audience members, or people that might be interested in learning about the arts. When students are younger, and they're not experienced as performers they can feel nervous, or they feel a certain pressure. I always try to tell them, ‘Think of it as: How many people get to do what we get to do? And know how to do what we know how to do? You get to give a gift to people.’ I've worked hard for it, but I have also been encouraged, so I want to give that encouragement to others in many different ways.”
Ariana’s efforts will be shared with The Great Northern’s audience in January at the Minneapolis Institute of Art through the compositions of Steve Heitzeg for light/see + dark/hear. In the last decade, Kim has spent a lot of time traveling to be able to step away from her musical life and round herself out in different ways, which eventually circle back to making her a better musician. “I'm a passionate rock climber. I don't know that I'm great, but it's something that I really love doing indoors and outdoors. I've gotten to climb some pretty incredible rock formations around the world. I just came back from a tour in Asia; I had a 24-hour period off during the tour, and my fiancé and I took a flight down to the Southern Thai coast and climbed these epic, world-famous limestone cliffs that hang over the ocean. I love being outdoors and sleeping under the stars and hiking and backpacking. Being in nature and connecting to Mother Earth brings certain things into music in ways that living inside can't.”
A lot of inspiration for what Kim pulled into light/see + dark/hear comes from her mentors and time spent in nature, listening to what was being communicated in its subtle ways. “I studied with Bobby Mann, who was the founder of the Juilliard Quartet, during grad school. He grew up on the Oregon coast, and he used to talk about laying on the cliffs over the water and listening to the waves hit the shore. He listened to how the waves hit the rocks and learned about rhythm through that, and it changed how you use certain things to inform others. When I was young, my dad taught me this movement in one of the Bach sonatas, ‘Siciliana.’ He used to say the rhythm comes from the way the boats sway in the Sicilian harbor. Being out in the world also allows you to get a sense of how massive the world is and how small we are. It humbles you to think that a branch broke, so I missed a note right when I was playing. It's all part of this much bigger cause and effect. I think being in nature makes you a better musician, because you feel things and you hear things in your body.” There is a secret link between all of the senses. For example, a wine may taste fruitier when consumed in close proximity to a piano during the dinner hour. According to a study made by Made Music Studio, sound can produce feeling sensations even when no touch is present—for example, hearing the buzz of a mosquito can make skin instantly prickle, because the frequency of the sound matches the vibration on the skin.
Even the act of cooking, another of Kim’s hobbies, can be visceral and draw out senses associating back to music. “I think food is also very related to music. The experience of taking an ingredient from the farmers market and turning it into something new is like getting a score and seeing it for the first time, and then you have to know what to do with it. With a turnip, you peel it, you slice it, you season it, you sauté it, then you eat it. We look at the score, we get an overview, we chat with a composer, we try some things that don't work, then we try some other things. There’s a lab process involved in cooking. Performing music and food is like a love language for me. I love cooking for people.”
Score by Steve Heitzeg.
Through all of these separate parts of her life, Kim pulls on the string, or violin string if you will, to connect all parts of her life back to music. “I've been on these epic, all-day climbs, and you get to the top and see the world is beneath you, and you use it. I bring that into the next day of practicing. ‘How do I make a sound from the top of the mountain? How do I create a bird song sound through my instrument? How do I remember when that branch cracked?’ I try to extend techniques and bring the natural world into sonic experiences. It’s something I do a lot with my contemporary music performances, and it’s also something that is built into every single movement of Steve's piece that we're going to be premiering in January.”
Kim says her portion of the performance was inspired by some volunteer work she did while living in Korea. “I volunteered with this group that helps to lead mountain hikes for people who are blind. I had this amazing partner; she was this woman who was 77 years old but hiked like a 20-year-old—just fearless, pint-sized, and packed with joy. I'm convinced that when you lose a sense, your other ones become more developed. For people who are blind, it can be in touch, or it can be in sensing the body. When you hike with her, you attach a rope to the back of your pack, and then hang on to it. As you hike, you narrate the path, ‘Oh, there's a big rock here, let's go to the left.’ In talking to her, everything was about the four other senses. So she would say, ‘Oh, the leaves sound like it's gonna rain later,’ or, ‘The kachi (magpie) is crowing. That means a guest is coming.’ She hears things in a way that the rest of us don't, because we take so much in through our eyes.” Perhaps she found inspiration from being in a place where her ancestors hailed from, or perhaps it was something that was here long before humans and will remain long after humans.
Drawing on this experience, Kim shares what audiences can expect from the sensory world of the upcoming work: “My inspiration for this was kind of born out of that, and the idea of experiencing something in total darkness. The flip side of that is people walk through the gallery in silence before the performance, so they're not using their ears. They don't necessarily discuss with other people, but they take the art in, and then go into the Black Box Theater and remove that visual piece. Hopefully those visual memories are still there, because it'll be involved in how I improvise the music, and then they experienced that intimacy in another way.”
Kim worked through Heitzeg’s light/see + dark/hear and brought back suggestions to Steve to enhance the piece. It’s one of the gifts she enjoys when working with living composers—the ability to collaborate and massage work into place. Once guests are seated for the performance, the low-vision gallery will eventually fade to pitch dark. From the center of the room, Ariana will deliver sounds that are rendered through her instruments. The idea is that the communication comes from something unspoken and unseen and gives into the intimacy of experiencing sensations in the dark. These echoes can be crackle sounds from scorched earth, or birdsong of a migratory bird recreated through a violin—but like all work that Ariana gathers, she absorbs, rearranges, then sets them back out into the world for others to experience.
Related events at The Great Northern:
Experience Ariana Kim & Steve Heitzeg’s light/see + dark/hear at the Minneapolis Institute of Art January 26-28.
More information and tickets at thegreatnorthernfestival.com.
Youa Vang is appreciative of all genres of music—even country. She lives in St. Paul and writes for Mn Artists, The Current, MSP Magazine, and reports on music for MPR. She has interviewed over 500 artists in her time as a journalist—some of those famous (Jeff Bridges, Chris Thile, Aimee Mann, David Lovering, Jeff Daniels) and many of those local to the Twin Cities who are just trying to make it. When not writing about music and art or attending shows, she can be found working on her standup comedy and cross-stitching mischievous sayings while watching The Simpsons. She is currently working on her first book, a collection of Hmong recipes that center around being an immigrant woman.