'Lovely connections'

For Paul Salerni, professor of music and the NEH Distinguished Chair in the Humanities, music unites not only his immediate family—his wife, Laura Johnson, is an opera and stage director and his two sons are fine musicians in their own right—but also what he calls his compositional family, whose members span generations.

The father of Salerni’s compositional family is his beloved composition teacher, the late Earl Kim.

Salerni began to spend time with Kim, an acclaimed Korean-American composer known for compositions that feature texts by Samuel Beckett, while in graduate school at Harvard University. The men spent holidays together, and Salerni and his wife even lived with Kim for a summer. Kim played with Salerni’s children and taught him to cook Korean food.

“We were as intimate as you could be without being family,” says Salerni.

Kim passed away in 1998, but his legacy lives on with his friend and former student. Salerni has already held two festivals in Kim’s honor, featuring performances of Kim’s music and the music of Kim’s students “because he was a great teacher.”

Last year, Salerni’s former student, Michael D’Ambrosio, decided to do for Salerni what Salerni had done for Kim. D’Ambrosio, now an associate professor of music at Murray State University, was one of Salerni’s first students to pursue music professionally. D’Ambrosio honored his teacher by holding two concert festivals at Murray State featuring Salerni’s work, a couple of his own pieces, and one of Kim’s.

“I said, ‘Alright, Mike. I’ve got to top you. You had three generations; I’ll have four,’” says Salerni, who wanted to honor what would have been Kim’s 95th birthday with a concert of his own.

The result is “Four Generations,” which was performed by the Vega String Quartet, Emory University’s Quartet in Residence, on Sunday, Jan. 25 in the Zoellner Arts Center’s Baker Hall. The program featured the music of all four generations of Salerni’s compositional family: Salerni, Kim, D’Ambrosio and Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, Kim’s teacher and “one of the great masters of the 20th century.”

“There are lovely connections,” says Salerni. “Arnold Schoenberg was one of the most influential figures in all of music history. When Schoenberg was writing the piece that we’re going to perform [“Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, Op. 41.”], Earl had just started to study with him. A lot of Earl’s music, even though it’s very different from Schoenberg, actually uses some of the language that Schoenberg developed in this particular piece.”

Further deepening these connections is the fact that the Vega Quartet’s first violinist is Salerni’s eldest son, Domenic, a man who grew up with Earl Kim and his music.

The program began with D’Ambrosio’s “Pistol Pete’s Passacaglia,” followed by Salerni’s “String Quartet 1.5,” Kim’s “Where Grief Slumbers” and Schoenberg’s “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, Op. 41.”

The Vega Quartet, which also features Jessica Shuang Wu on violin, Yinzi Kong on viola and Guang Wang on cello, premiered Salerni’s "String Quartet 1.5" in November at Emory. Salerni hadn’t written a pure string quartet since he was in graduate school when Domenic approached him to write one for the Vega Quartet.

“I had spent so much of my recent compositional past writing ballets or operas or song cycles, so this was hard. But it was a great opportunity to kind of let loose,” says Salerni.

Lehigh students also participated in the celebration. The Dirac Quartet, which features David Turk ’17 and Michelle Fedun ’17 on violin, Ferguson Watkins ‘18 on viola and Max Watkins ’15 on violoncello, joined the Vega Quartet, professional soprano Sophia Burgos and harpist Kellen Lowrie ‘15 in the performance of Kim’s “Where Grief Slumbers.”

“Our undergraduates don’t go on to become performers, but we want to give them a peak experience,” says Salerni, “We have our best undergraduate performers perform with professionals, playing music written by us or written by contemporaries.”

Salerni enjoyed showcasing the talent of so many, especially because the audience included more family: Kim’s daughter as well as his widow, Martha Potter Kim, a violinist for whom Kim wrote many of his pieces.

“I miss him very much,” says Salerni of Kim.

And so Salerni has created a program bound by so many rich connections that it seems more of a reunion, where the bonds between teacher and student come to life in the sounds of strings and voices.

Story by Kelly Hochbein