Kay Rhie often explores in her music the issues of belonging and the science of acoustics. She is inspired by a wide-ranging palette of classical, film, and European avant-garde music as well as various literary and artistic traditions. Her musical studies began in South Korea on the piano from the age of seven, and continued at the University of California at Los Angeles and Cornell University. She is currently Assistant Professor of Composition and Theory at the University of California at Los Angeles. Her chamber opera Quake was premiered by Opera UCLA in 2023. H’on, commissioned by the LA Philharmonic Orchestra, will premiere in June 2025.
Ms. Rhie was a recipient of the Charles Ives Fellowship given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2008, which said her music has “vehemence and reticence,” where “intimacy and plainness co-exist.” Recently, she was a recipient of the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Grant Award in 2022.
Residences have included the Aspen Music Festival, Banff Centre for the Arts and the Chamber Music Conference and Composers’ Forum of the East. At the Tanglewood Music Center, she was the Otto Eckstein Composition Fellow and the winner of the Geffen-Solomon New Music Commission in 2007. From 2008-2009, she was a Rieman and Baketel Music Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University.
Performers of her music include the BBC Singers, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Ensemble X, In Mulieribus, Wild-Up, Brightwork New Music, the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, Winsor Music, Wild-Up, and the Strobe Ensemble.