Posted May 1, 2026
May Theme | #TakeAStand
Music can be world-building: a way of making space for voices, histories, and ways of being that might otherwise go unheard.
This May, for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Denver Philharmonic Orchestra celebrates the composers whose work has quietly (and sometimes boldly) reshaped what classical music can sound like, mean, and do.
The AAPI community spans more than 70 countries, each carrying its own musical traditions and histories. The composers we lift up this month don’t fit neatly into a single story. But there is a thread that connects many of them: the experience of living and creating between worlds, carrying one musical inheritance while working in another, and refusing to abandon either.
That creative tension hasn’t just produced beautiful music. It has expanded the entire canon.
Queen Lili’uokalani (1838–1917)
Before she was a composer, she was a queen—and she remained both even after her throne was taken from her. Queen Lili’uokalani reigned over the Hawaiian Islands until 1893, when American-backed forces overthrew the Kingdom of Hawaii. She was later imprisoned, and it was during her imprisonment that she continued to write music. With no instrument available, she composed by voice alone, transcribing melodies in her cell until she could put them to paper. Among the works that emerged was Aloha ʻOe: a song of farewell and longing that became one of the most recognized Hawaiian melodies in history.
Her legacy is a reminder that music can survive what power cannot, and that cultural expression is itself a form of sovereignty.
Earl Kim (1920–1998)
Earl Kim is one of the most significant American composers of the 20th century that most audiences have never heard of, and his story begins not in a concert hall, but in the fields of California.
Born to Korean immigrants working as day laborers in Dinuba, California, Kim began piano studies at age nine. A church pianist recognized his talent and offered him free lessons. From there, he went on to study with some of the most formidable composers of the era (Arnold Schoenberg, Ernest Bloch, and Roger Sessions) before his education was interrupted by World War II, in which he served as a combat intelligence officer in the Pacific.
Having witnessed the devastation of the bombing of Nagasaki firsthand in 1945, Kim became an ardent antinuclear activist. One particular image stayed with him and quietly shaped everything he wrote afterward: a single truck moving through the ruins, a fragile sign of human life amid destruction.
His music reckons with themes of loss, fragility, and survival. He later traveled to Paris to ask Samuel Beckett personally for permission to set his plays to music, becoming one of the few composers ever granted that privilege. His Violin Concerto, premiered by Itzhak Perlman with the New York Philharmonic, stands as one of his most celebrated orchestral works. He spent decades teaching at Princeton and Harvard, where his students included John Adams and David Del Tredici.
Tan Dun (b. 1957)
Tan Dun is a Chinese American composer world-renowned for his work on film scores and conducting. He won a Grammy for his score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and has conducted ensembles including the Met, the London Symphony, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. But his orchestral work goes far deeper than Hollywood recognition. His Water Concerto and Paper Concerto use found materials like water, paper, & stones as instruments alongside a full orchestra, rooted in the Chinese philosophical tradition that all things carry sound. His Symphony 1997: Heaven Earth Mankind, commissioned for the handover of Hong Kong, drew from ancient Chinese bell music and was performed by cellist Yo-Yo Ma. He moves between worlds not as a compromise, but as a conviction.
Unsuk Chin (b. 1961)
Unsuk Chin’s career began with the piano her father, a Presbyterian minister, bought for his church. She was two years old. Largely self-taught until university, she grew up in a family that, like most in South Korea in the 1960s, could not afford lessons. She went on to study with one of the most demanding musical educations imaginable, György Ligeti, in Hamburg and has since become one of the most performed contemporary composers in the world. Her 2004 Grawemeyer Award-winning Violin Concerto has been performed across 14 countries; her opera Alice in Wonderland was named Premiere of the Year by international critics. She explicitly resists the label of “Asian composer,” insisting her music belongs to no single culture—even as it reflects a mind shaped by the experience of navigating many.
Reena Esmail (b. 1983)
Indian American composer Reena Esmail describes her life’s work as using music to start conversations across difference: between Indian and Western classical traditions, between communities, between ways of hearing. A Fulbright-Nehru scholar who studied Hindustani classical music in India after formal training at Juilliard and Yale, her music doesn’t blend traditions so much as let them genuinely speak to each other. Her recent work Malhaar: A Requiem for Water received major critical acclaim. It reflects a composer as concerned with the world outside the concert hall as the one inside it.
The Bigger Picture
A Hawaiian queen composing in captivity, a Korean dissident writing through imprisonment and exile, a Japanese composer who had to be invited back to his own musical heritage by an American, and a self-taught South Korean woman who became one of the world’s most acclaimed living voices. These composers share almost nothing on the surface, but each created work that the standard canon had no category for. Each made space that didn’t previously exist.
Take a Stand with Us
- Listen Intentionally — Seek out Isang Yun’s Réak, Takemitsu’s November Steps, Unsuk Chin’s Violin Concerto, and Reena Esmail’s The Love Between Us. Let the music speak first.
- Go Deeper — Explore the Institute for Composer Diversity database and the Music of Asian America Research Center (MAARC), which works to collect, promote, and teach music created by Asian Americans.
- Advocate for Diverse Programming — Encourage the orchestras and ensembles you support to include AAPI composers in their seasons. Not just in May, but year-round.
- Share your story — Use #TakeAStand and tag @denverphilorch across socials. Download one of our Take a Stand badges and make it visible.
Sources:
BBVA Foundation. “South Korean Composer Unsuk Chin Wins the Frontiers Award for Music and Opera.” BBVA.com, 18 Mar. 2026, bbva.com/en/south-korean-composer-unsuk-chin-wins-the-frontiers-award-for-music-and-opera/
EBSCO Research Starters. “Earl Kim.” ebsco.com, ebsco.com/research-starters/biography/earl-kim
Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung. “Unsuk Chin Biography.” evs-musikstiftung.ch/en/music-prize/unsuk-chin/unsuk-chin-biography/
Harvard Magazine. “Remembering Harvard Professor and Composer Earl Kim.” harvardmagazine.com, Mar. 2025. harvardmagazine.com/2025/03/remembering-earl-kim
YourClassical. “6 Essential Asian American and Pacific Islander Composers You Should Know.” yourclassical.org, 10 May 2021. yourclassical.org/story/2021/05/10/6-essential-asian-american-and-pacific-islander-composers-you-should-know