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. A new work for the LA Philharmornic Orchestra will premiere in 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.” She was awarded the Grand Prize for Student Compositions at the Ojai Music Festival in 2001, Il-shin Composition Award in 2021, Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Grant Award in 2022. Residences have included the Aspen Music Festival (2003), and the Chamber Music Conference and Composers’ Forum of the East (2004). 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.
Her music has been performed at the London Festival of American Music, Banff Centre for the Arts, the Hear Now Festival, Seal Bay Festival of American Chamber Music, Tanglewood Music Center, and the Ars Nova Series in Korea. Performers include the the BBC Singers, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Ensemble TM+ (Paris), Ensemble X, In Mulieribus, the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, members of the Tongyeong International Music Festival (TIMF), Winsor Music, Pianist Gloria Cheng, Violinists Movses Pogossian, Andrew Jennings, Georgia Hannant and Violist Ralf Ehlers of Arditti Quartet.
