Solomon Kim – Composer

Rip Currents

PROGRAM NOTE:

Rip Currents is a reflection on childhood, love, and maturation composed on a text by Sylvan Lebrun (Yale College ’24). Sylvan’s text evoked our shared memories growing up in the city of Tokyo – our explorations of the city and life abroad as a proxy for family relationships, friendships, and maturation. Rip Currents explores the unfathomable nature of love, the mysteries of childhood, and cyclical realities by juxtaposing deliberately artificial sounds and exposed natural sonorities. Throughout this piece, ordinary sounds are recontextualized in a web of memory and history, declamatory statements are punctuated by echoes across time and space, and we are drawn to pay attention.

Rip Currents is a part of Network Theory, a compilation of pieces taking commissioned texts by Sylvan Lebrun (B.A. Comparative Literature, Yale College, est. 2024) and Clayton Trumbull (B.M. Composition, Eastman School of Music, est. 2024), paired with commissioned visual art in response by Angelique Gomez (Emory alumna, ‘2022). Referring to the sociological concept of “network theory,” this song cycle is a representation of artistic interactions and collaborations from significant times and places in my life.