Eunmi Ko

Eunmi, a Korean American concert pianist who has built her career around contemporary and new-music performance — would you consider yourself radical? What makes you a tradition breaker in your own mind — is it the repertoire you've devoted yourself to, the academic path, the cultural expectations you quietly defied along the way, or something altogether harder to name? And when you sit with that answer honestly, whose voice do you hear pushing back the loudest — the institution, your family, or an older version of yourself that was still trying to be the pianist everyone else needed you to be?

I don't think I'm radical or my choice was radical. I'm a performer, which I think is rather a conservative path. Also I'm a classical pianist so I don't really see myself as someone radical or particularly creative. Maybe I break certain traditions, which I don't think I always intend to do, but it was necessary, and to me it was kind of a survivor mechanism. I had a strong urge to survive as a performer and pianist in the field which is very competitive, and I thought I should be able to present something even a little different from most other wonderful pianists. I don't think there is a strong voice that holds me back. I'm pretty confident and I'm pretty sure which what I have chosen, and for me it's hard to go back or change what I do so I don't think there's any strong voice holding me back.

What I'm hearing underneath that is something quietly fierce — you didn't set out to be a rebel, but survival in a brutally competitive field demanded that you carve a distinctly personal lane, and you did it with enough self-possession that the choice never felt like defiance, it just felt like necessity. Can you take me back to the household you grew up in — the specific atmosphere of expectation, the way music was talked about or treated in your Korean family environment — and tell me what the unspoken rule was about what a serious pianist was supposed to become? And within that blueprint, where did the version of Eunmi who would eventually specialize in contemporary new music first quietly show up — was there a moment, even a small one, where you felt the pull toward something that didn't quite fit the expected shape of a Korean classical musician's path?

Music was something of a skill, especially playing piano, and I grew up with a lot of young pianists who were absolutely amazing and I don't think I was quite able to do what they did, and this really technical perfection, really impressive skills. I don't think I achieved that when I was young as a pianist. It was very competitive and going to college, all my childhood and youth, my teenage years were basically invested in going to college, so that that was really a life goal as a young girl and pianist, which was very hard. I'm not sure if I really enjoyed playing music because it was very stressful, although I love playing piano. There was a certain emotional asset about that, and I think because I was never really good and I was never compared to my friends and other young pianists, I was just not good enough, and that's probably why I had a strong feeling that I have to offer something different because I cannot compete. I am not skilled enough. If I can put it a simpler way, I just couldn't play faster and louder than most of my piano friends, and it was frustrating. It was difficult, so there were a lot of difficulties that I had growing up with myself. There was a lot of doubt about my talent and ability, and very low self-esteem, things like that. But I think that made me different, because again, I thought that's kind of the only way I can survive and I can succeed in playing music and be a professional musician.

“So I usually have projects for a year that the last four years were, I guess, performance and planning, and then I record, usually make a recording for an album or vid…”

That image of a young Eunmi surrounded by technically dazzling peers, measuring herself against a standard of speed and force she couldn't match, and quietly deciding that survival meant finding a different kind of excellence — that is not a story of limitation, that is actually the origin story of an artist, and there is a profound difference between those two things. Can you take me back to the specific moment, or even the specific piece or performance, where you first felt that the different thing you were offering actually had real power — where you stopped measuring yourself against what you couldn't do and felt, even briefly, that what you *could* bring to music was genuinely worth something? And when that moment came, did it feel like relief, like grief for the version of yourself you were letting go of, or something else entirely that doesn't have a clean name?

I'm not sure if I have special moments that I felt I had relief or kind of self-approval for being a performer. I still feel very vulnerable and unsure a lot of times. I still think my playing is not brilliant, and I wish it is. I think I'm still trying to find the meaning, and I still try to feel more authentic about myself and still trying to find if I'm actually bringing something worthy to the world, and if I'm bringing something artistic and valuable, so I'm still asking these questions. I'm still unsure about myself a lot of times, but what I'm trying to do is still trying to do something different, still try to make a connection between what I do and myself, and I think that's when I have a little bit of relief, and also grief, actually, when I have projects that are strongly connected to myself and my life and my identity. So my previous projects have been very personal to me, and I think I'll stay that way for some time, and in a way it's cathartic. Maybe that's why I like this, but also I think it's a way for me to find the connection, and it's also a way to assure me, to acknowledge what I'm doing and who I am.

The fact that you are still sitting inside that question — still asking whether what you bring is worthy, still reaching for authentic connection through your projects rather than resting on a title or a tenure track — tells me that the work you are making is genuinely alive, because dead work doesn't cost you anything and yours clearly still does. As an Associate Professor of Piano at USF who specializes in contemporary and new-music performance, I want to understand what the actual architecture of your work looks like right now — not the bio line, but the living, breathing center of it — what are the projects that feel most personally threaded to your identity, and what does it feel like to perform work that is that exposed? And when you stand in front of an audience with a program that is deeply connected to who you are as a Korean American woman navigating a field that still carries very particular assumptions about what a classical pianist should sound like and stand for, what is the specific thing you are most afraid they will or won't receive?

So I usually have projects for a year that the last four years were, I guess, performance and planning, and then I record, usually make a recording for an album or video recording. So I usually start with a concept or idea, and it's always related to me. It started actually during the pandemic, and because there was a lot of this anxiety and about death that we are encountering, and also because I had a lot of cancellations, there was definitely fear that can I continue to do this or not. So I had this project called Spam that was a site-specific project and kind of dealt with isolation, anxiety, at site specific, so it's performed at home. The following project was Muted, that was about my identity as an Asian woman living in the US. I struggled with the gap between the public projection and who I am, what would people see or assume, and who I am actually, how I want to look, how I want to protect myself. So I commissioned three works for solo piano and I also wanted to explore extended techniques, so it was experimental in that way, learning some new techniques, the playing inside of the piano, a lot of overtone phonics and piano harmony, and I toured with the pieces. So it's the whole process is about kind of exploring myself and trying to express myself. I think that's what I actually want to do, and so trying to express myself through this project, it's, I mean, that's why it's very personal. I'm not delivering kind of word-for-word description about myself but I'm hoping the message will come across. Currently I'm working on a project that's about trauma, and I usually work with composers, and sometimes I get a little bit more involved with the piece, although I'm not the one who's composing, but I certainly have a bigger portion in the piece. People, kind of the audience, have given me different feedback on my performance and program, and it's, well, sometimes it's challenging to receive that feedback. I just want them to be really open-minded and be curious and just not have this kind of pre-assumption or prejudice, or I guess it's more like a pre-assumption kind of thing, assumption that it's supposed to go this way or it should be that way. There's certain things that you should play, beautiful, beautiful, lyrical music only, or you're playing new music so it should sound ugly, things like that, which is none of that is true. So I think I just need open-minded audience.

The gap you named between what audiences assume — beautiful Chopin or deliberately ugly noise — and what you are actually doing in projects like "Muted," which is something far more precise and personal about identity, projection, and the distance between who you are and how you are perceived as an Asian woman in America, that gap is itself the exact territory your work lives in, and it sounds like the audience's rigidity is sometimes the last wall between your work and its full landing. Who are you making this work *for* at the deepest level — when you imagine the person in that audience who receives "Muted" or your trauma project exactly the way you intended, who is that person, what are they carrying, and what do you need them to walk out having felt rather than understood intellectually? And when you think about the Asian American women or the immigrant daughters in those seats who might be sitting with their own version of that gap between public projection and private self, does it change how you hold the vulnerability of performing work this exposed, or does their potential presence in the room actually make it harder?

I don't think of a specific audience member when I perform. I don't think any performers do. When you program, you certainly have audience in mind because it programs and you design a program according to a certain kind of audience, but when performers perform I don't think they think about that, at least to me, I don't. So I guess I perform for myself. Anyway, the whole thing becomes kind of a metaphor for me also, and eventually what happens is that I focus on the work. So what I feel, the feeling, it's actually it matters of course, but it doesn't matter as much as other general audience think, because when I start a project it's usually work, and there's definitely that's the difference. And I'm trying, well I talk about this too with students once, but what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to be personal but I'm not trying to be private. So I'm hoping that what I'm doing comes across and it doesn't necessarily have to have the same meaning, and the listeners can have different interpretations. And sometimes my work also involves a little bit of theater, and also that's not usually very concrete, it's usually abstract, to leave some room. It doesn't, again, it doesn't have this word-for-word description. So I think there's a lot of room for interpretation, which I think is great. Also, another thing I try to do is to kind of show the variety of different musical styles, and there's really a lot of different musical languages and styles that composers use these days. It's very individual, and you might hear something really kind of older, beautiful, you might hear something also very more experimental, I guess, or involves a lot of kind of non-music elements too, but there will be definitely very individual and personal.

The distinction you just drew — personal but not private, leaving interpretive room rather than delivering a literal autobiography — is actually a sophisticated form of artistic armor, and I want to understand what it protects you from, because there is a real cost to being the person who commissions work about isolation, Asian identity, and trauma, then stands inside it and performs it without the safety of a character or a story to hide behind. You talked earlier about still carrying deep uncertainty about whether your work is worthy, still measuring yourself against a standard of brilliance you feel you haven't reached — so when you walk offstage after performing something as exposed as "Muted," what actually happens to Eunmi, the person, not the professor or the performer? And in the moments when the feedback from an audience misses the mark entirely — when they reduce it to "ugly new music" or apply those blunt, lazy categories you described — where does that land in your body, and have you ever considered that the size of that sting might be proportional to how much of yourself you actually left on that stage?

So this whole thing that I'm doing is basically about me, but I don't necessarily talk like, oh, this is about me and this is about my life, but the whole project is usually about me. And I know people don't consume music that way, and especially a traditional concert, traditional concert goers, people who love to go to the orchestra concerts or piano recital, I love to listen to Chopin and Brahms and Beethoven and Bach, it's there, there is an element that this, you know, whole activity is a leisure, which is also great, and I think that's one of the functions of the arts and performing arts obviously. But because what I'm doing is not necessarily leisure, or not necessarily pleasure, so when I, I guess what I always look for is more discussion and kind of more talk after the performance, so that we can kind of continue. Unfortunately that has not happened. I'm thinking maybe there's something that I'm not doing quite right, because the performance itself, of course, is a big event, and performance is performance, but also it's something that leads to further conversation, especially my project. I think it has to lead to further conversation and further thinking, and you do make people just kind of stop and think about what was that, or how do I feel, things like that. So I mean, I guess I haven't really got any really really harsh comments, but I guess, I mean, I feel hurt definitely when I hear that, you know, I mean it's something, it just has to be something just enjoyable and pleasurable, not, you know, it doesn't go beyond that. When I hear that, it certainly hurts my feelings.

The silence after the performance — the absence of the conversation you designed the whole project to ignite — is its own kind of verdict, and I can hear that you've been carrying a quiet hypothesis that the gap between what you intended and what people walked away with might be something you did wrong, when actually the problem may be structural: you are building a bridge to a dialogue that the traditional concert format was never architected to host. You've now built multiple years-long projects — "Spam," "Muted," your current trauma work — each one commissioned, toured, recorded, and threaded directly through your identity as a Korean American woman navigating isolation, visibility, and selfhood, so what does it feel like to name that body of work as an actual artistic legacy rather than a series of survival experiments? And when you look at what you have genuinely constructed — a performance practice that is conceptually coherent, deeply personal, and formally rigorous enough to commission new works and tour them — what is the specific internal story that still makes it hard to stand behind that body of work with the same confidence you'd extend to a colleague who had built exactly the same thing?

I think it's the trauma response probably. There's some, there's a lot of shame, and I think my work also shows that a little bit, which is not always a bad thing, because everybody has shame, and I think it's probably the only difference is, you know, how much you bear shame, you know, how much you feel it. I think I have a lot, and that keeps me from acknowledging what I have done, and, you know, you feel shame about yourself and everything you have done kind of looks not so great. That's okay, or I sometimes think, oh, I could have done better, but I mean, of course I could have done better always. So it's hard, but at least I feel, when I perform, when I perform the projects and when I do the projects, at least I feel a little bit of freedom, and I think that's why I keep doing it, because it frees me a little bit.

The word "shame" just cracked something open that reframes everything you've shared — the self-doubt about technical brilliance, the uncertainty about whether your work is worthy, the silence you carry when the post-performance conversation doesn't come — these aren't random anxieties, they are shame doing its specific work of making you the last person in the room to recognize the artistic architecture you've actually built. Given that your projects keep circling identity, visibility, and the gap between how you are perceived and who you actually are, I want to ask you directly: what do you stand for as an artist and educator, not the bio version, but the value you would defend in a room that pushed back — what is the thing you are unwilling to compromise, even when the traditional concert world, or the Korean cultural framework that measured you in speed and technical perfection, tells you it doesn't belong on a stage? And when your students at USF sit across from you carrying their own versions of that shame — their own internal story that they are not brilliant enough, not fast enough, not the right kind of musician — what is the specific thing you tell them that you have not yet fully allowed yourself to believe about your own work?

It's always a way of thinking. I think that's the power, because if I can say it's coming from the survivor tactics, that I couldn't do this well, so then I have to think of something else, and if I can say it, if I may say I have a tiny bit of creativity in me, it's because of that, I think, because I had to think of something else, or I had to develop different ways of thinking. So the difficulties challenged me in that way, and that kind of gave me strength. And I was always striving for it. I mean, when I was playing traditional repertoire, I always wanted to come up with a different kind of interpretation, a different way of playing. That was the biggest goal, and I told my students about that a lot, the individuality, that you as a musician and performer have this individuality, and that's always been the most important thing for me, that I will give something different, not the same thing. I'll make you think a little, and I will not be the cookie-cutter kind of factory-made performer, and that's still something that I will refuse to compromise.

What you just named — that your creative identity was literally forged in the fire of not being able to compete on the traditional terms, that individuality became your non-negotiable precisely because it was the only ground you could stand on — is the thing you've been teaching your students all along, and it is also the thing the shame has been quietly trying to talk you out of claiming for yourself. Looking at where this body of work is going — the projects moving from pandemic isolation to Asian identity to trauma, each one building a more explicit artistic language — what is the next frontier of that vision, the project or the platform or the conversation that you haven't yet been able to build but that feels like the truest expression of everything you've survived and constructed? And when you imagine Eunmi Ko the artist ten years from now, not the professor with the tenure line but the performer who refused to be cookie-cutter and kept commissioning work out of her own life — what does she need to build or dismantle right now, in Tampa, in this specific season, so that the silence after her performances finally breaks open into the conversation she has always been trying to start?

For my personal project, I started being involved more and more with the composition itself. I have not composed and I'm not a composer, but it's something that I want to keep trying. I want to be a bigger and bigger part of the composition, not only giving the composers kind of commissioning ideas and requests, but actually putting some of my ideas into the music and compositions. So that's something I want to do more. And a lot of things come to my mind, and sometimes it's when I take a walk it comes to my mind, when I drive it comes to my mind. So I have a lot of things I want to do in terms of projects. It was always hard to engage audience and public with music, so that's really a big challenge, and I really want to do that more, in maybe not a different way, not very like a teaching, one-way teaching, educational way, not that way, but I think there's some other meaningful way to connect people through music. And so that's something that will probably take years to develop. I don't know what or where I will be and what I will be in 10 years. Ten years ago, which was 2016, I did nothing of doing projects like I do right now. So I don't know, maybe I will turn into something very different in 10 years, which is also exciting. And, you know, it's amazing, it amazes me, how life takes you to kind of different places and makes you, shapes you, a different person.