Seo Yoon Soyoona Kim 김서윤 (b.1988) writes music to spotlight and cherish underrepresented stories while exploring time, harmony, and texture in interdisciplinary settings. She employs voice, acoustic and electronic instruments, as well as found sounds in her music to realize the soundscape she imagines.
Highlights include a performance of her orchestra piece Rain, Thunder, Lightning at the Johns Hopkins University East Asian Cultural Expo, which engages her memory of Jangma, the rainy season in Korea; four performances of her theatrical piece Give me my leg back!, that retells her favorite childhood story in her way; a performance of her opera Dear Father, which explores the longing for the education of Korean women; and two visual album release - Hearing Stars and The Ocean's Cry, a product of collaboration with the Space Telescope Science Center, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and her composers' collective CNSNC.
Seo Yoon has received fellowships, commissions, and awards from the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, American Guild of Organists, and 4th International "New Vision" Composition Competition in memory of Krzysztof Penderecki. Her music was performed by the Peabody Symphony Orchestra, Peabody Opera department, Popebama, Bergamot Quartet, Density512, Divergent Studio, Pique Collective, as well as numerous solo performers.
Raised in Republic of Korea, Russia, and United States, Seo Yoon received diverse education from three countries. With degrees from the Seoul National University (B.M. in Musicology, B.A. in Russian language and literature, and the Certificate in music education), and Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University (M.M. in music composition and music theory pedagogy), Kim is currently pursuing her doctoral degree in music at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. She is grateful to her mentors Kevin Puts, Michael Hersch, Harold Meltzer, Gabriela Lena Frank, Yevgeniy Sharlat, Byung-dong Paik, Bong-ho Kim, and Mikhail Bogdanov.
Seo Yoon resides in Englewood, NJ with her husband. When not composing,
she birds.
