Particle physicist will perform with CU Symphony

Kim

The Cornell Symphony Orchestra presents its season debut in Bailey Hall, Sunday, Oct. 18, at 3 p.m., under the direction of conductor Edward Murray. The program, free and open to the public, features Aram Khachaturian's Violin Concerto -- with soloist, and particle physicist, Daniel Kim -- and Antonín Dvorák's Sixth Symphony.

Soloist Kim, a visiting fellow at Cornell's Nuclear Studies Laboratory, was born in Rock Springs, Wyo., where his musical training began with the piano at age 4 and the violin at age 5. He was raised in Houghton, Mich., where his parents, Dr. Nam Kim, an engineering professor at Michigan Tech University, and Sook Kim, a piano teacher, still live.

He studied both instruments throughout high school; his musical highlight being a performance and public radio broadcast of the Grieg Piano Concerto with the Keweenaw Symphony Orchestra. However, his primary achievements were in mathematics and science; he took college calculus in the eighth grade and attained national ranking in numerous mathematics and physics competitions. He graduated from Houghton High School in 1991 as class president and valedictorian. As an undergraduate at Harvard University, Kim was a violinist, pianist and saxophonist in the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra and a conductor of the Toscanini Chamber Orchestra. He graduated in 1995 with B.A. and M.A. degrees in physics, magna cum laude, and is now a doctoral candidate at Harvard in experimental particle physics.

Kim moved to Ithaca in 1996, as his Ph.D. thesis will be based on data collected at the CLEO experiment, located at Cornell's Wilson Synchrotron Lab. It was in Ithaca that he discovered a passion for the violin, and he since has directed his musical energies toward it. He is a associate concertmaster of the Cornell Symphony Orchestra and a new member of the violin section of the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra (CCO). His principal teacher is Linda Case, concertmaster of the CCO, and his chamber music teachers at Cornell are Professor John Hsu, Professor Emeritus Sonya Monosoff, and pianist Xak Bjerken. So far in 1998, he has been a scholarship student of artists in the Cleveland and Manhattan String Quartets and the Apple Hill Chamber Players, both individually and as the first violinist of the Cascadilla String Quartet.

Kim believes that an understanding of physical principles is an important asset to the violinist in achieving artistic goals, and he enjoys exploring theoretical topics in the intersection of physics and violin performance such as tuning. Now 25, he has no concrete plans beyond graduation, but is fairly certain that music and physics will be involved.