The People’s Conductor. Pied Piper. Bridge Builder. Passionate Performer. Hollywood Composer. It takes a multitude of monikers to try to describe Kim Allen Kluge, Loudoun Symphony Orchestra Music Director. In the end, he says he’s all about community and connectedness, seeing music as the string that binds humanity together.
Born in Madison, Wisconsin, he was raised in a small town outside of Madison. His mom was Korean, which, at the time, was a rare ethnic minority in the rural Midwest. “I was a racial, ethnic, and cultural minority. So, I developed at a very early age this passion – and I would even call it a sense of mission – to be a bridge builder, and to use whatever I was given to help build bridges to connect people. That’s what drew me to the Loudoun Symphony. I see a lot of opportunities here.”
From an early age, Kim begged for a piano, though he couldn’t say where this desire originated. He earned money with a paper route to help his parents finally buy one, then added a violin and four more instruments which he now plays proficiently. His church made him the church organist while he was still in Middle School, and that blossomed into a “ministry” of music.
“I learned music had the ability to heal, and realized the power and responsibility that came with that when I was just a kid. I had that sense of mission from an early age. I learned about both service to others, and the power of music and the arts to unite people and create community.”
He attended Oberlin as an undergrad, graduating valedictorian from its world-class conservatory with a string of awards. He pursued doctorates in Piano and Conducting from the University of Maryland, holds conducting diplomas from the Academia Musicale Chigiana in Siena and spent many seasons at Tanglewood where he studied with Seiji Ozawa as a conducting fellow. He transformed the Alexandria Symphony Orchestra into a regional arts hub, founded Capital City Opera, and has guest-conducted the Boston Pops Orchestra, the Baltimore Lyric Opera, Sinfonietta de Paris, and Les Solistes Parisiens and the Mannheim Chamber Orchestra. (And, yes, that’s the “short list.”)
It could have been his early passion for music that moved him to help spearhead the first El Sistema program in the Washington, DC area, an equity-based music program that helps build leadership in young musicians. A leader in the Washington Inter-Arts Movement, he also helped inaugurate the Music Diaries Project, a grassroots arts program to bring greater diversity and inclusiveness to the performing arts.
But if you think that just means teaching kids classical music, you’d be wrong. If anything, the bridges Kim builds go both ways, and his February “Truth & Transcendence” concert featured not only George Walker’s “Lyric for Strings,” but Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida,” and Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy.” As a shining example of the American Dream in action, he also introduced Loudoun to a family of Ukrainian musicians, the Melichenko Family, whom he helped to secure asylum in the US and who now live in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
The family’s performers are father Sergiy, who plays the button accordion; son Vladyslav, 17, who has played the same instrument since he was five, and daughter Anastasia, 12, on violin, who already has competed internationally. Their joyful rendition of “It’s What a Wonderful World,” with its poignant reminder that much of their own homeland may in fact have vanished, brought down the house.
But the sharing of neither truth nor transcendence was over for the evening. Kim first introduced, then the orchestra played, the debut of a composition Kim wrote with his wife Kathryn, whom he calls the “more gifted” of their “wife-husband” composing duo. “Traveler in the Mist,” said Kim, is a “musical meditation for orchestra and recorded soundtrack” inspired by the murders of the Osage Nation Peoples in the early 1900’s, as detailed in the book and movie “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
The Kluges in fact wrote the piece to inspire director Martin Scorsese, for whom they composed the soundtrack to the 2016 movie “Silence.” Scorsese ended up scoring “Killers” with a Native American composer, Robbie Robertson, who died shortly after completing the album. Not being included in the movie score does nothing to diminish the haunting “voices” of the composition’s blackjack trees, represented with an “evocative rattling sound,” the gibbering of coyotes, the howling of wolves and the screaming of owls called upon to lament the murderous plot that nearly wiped out the Osage people.
Kim helped his audience anticipate these sounds by describing them in advance, along with the crowing and knocking of crows that foreshadow tribe members’ murders, the rhythmic pounding of an oil drill drawing both prosperity and doom, the mechanical whistle of a train with its “ominous sense of inevitability,” and an actual field recording of a metaphorical last buffalo stampede, all accentuated by Native American instruments. Once ignited, his listeners’ imagination was transported into the tale of how greed caused many Osage tribe members to vanish into the blood-soaked ground of the plains. Kim relates that he and his wife were inspired by a descendant of a murdered Osage family who quoted Genesis in describing the tragedy. She told “Killers of the Flower Moon” author David Gann, “The blood cries out from the ground” – as God said to Cain after he killed his brother Abel. “We found so much poetry, irony and power in this phrase and how it was used in this context,” Kim says.
Kim’s conducting of the performance offered insight into his own view of how much energy the audience itself injects into every musical performance. Before raising his baton, he led a packed audience at St. David’s Episcopal Church into humming the main elements of the composition’s core melody, compiling an impromptu, augmented chord from their assembled voices. “You are meant to help create this world,” he explained; “It is as if the music is asking, ‘Why? Why?’... We believe that this very important part of American history should never be forgotten.”
There’s much more magic to come from the Kluges, both in and outside of Hollywood. Stay tuned. For now, Loudoun is his stage, despite the absence of a single arts venue large enough to accommodate LSO’s fans in just one performance. To fuel the orchestra’s own needs, he’s promised to dazzle the crowd at an April 27th fundraiser by both playing and conducting Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”. (See loudounsymphony.org for details.) But it’s the June performances of “One Planet, One Community,” that Kim hopes will afford the symphony an opportunity to unify Loudoun’s love of the arts.
This program will take place at 4 PM, Saturday, June 1 at ION Arena and a second concert Sunday, June 2 featuring Holst's “The Planets.” At ION, Olympic skaters will offer their own interpretations of how artistic expression is both individual and what unites all humanity, and a large screen, multimedia presentation will show collected artistic works by Loudouners all interpreting the theme: “What brings us together: as residents of Loudoun, as human beings in the natural world, and as part of a global civilization.”
On June 1, original works solicited from Loudoun County Public Schools and professional artists will be displayed on a screen behind the orchestra on Ion Arena’s massive stage. LCPS created some of the artwork via a collaboration between teachers and students. Tickets for the ION performance will be sold on ION’s website Ionarena.com.
The inspiration for these performances “grew out of a post-pandemic vision of rebuilding community through a heightened awareness of our global connectedness, our need to take better care of one another and our planet, and a conviction that all humans are innately creative.” The goal, says Kim, is “to unleash the creative energies of Loudoun County and bring us all closer together.”
Kim reflects daily on his motto: “I believe in the power of music to inspire, transcend, unite communities and make the world a better place.” Loudoun County is “such a diverse and sprawling community and it is growing so rapidly. You've got all the traditional influences plus this huge influx of new ideas and new energy.” He’s excited to see how it all mixes together. “Our goal is to unleash the creativity of Loudoun and then to put it on public display for all to enjoy!”
“All humans are born innately creative, all of us,” he adds. “It makes me sad when people say they aren’t creative, but I try to help them look at themselves in a different way. I want, through this ‘One Planet, One Community’ festival, to inspire Loudoun County to look at itself as a place exploding with creative energies from all across different artistic expressions, including science… I wouldn't be surprised if there's some 12-year-old out there in Loudoun County who comes up with a solution for climate change!”
So there it is. Maestro Kluge, has lit a lamp, put the flute to his lips and is piping us across a bridge held up by the hands of all Loudoun’s creators. We follow willingly. Trust us when we say that, once you’ve listened, you can’t unhear the tune, and he’ll always leave you wanting more.
The goal, says Kim, is “to unleash the creative energies of Loudoun County and bring us all closer together.”
“I believe in the power of music to inspire, transcend, unite communities and make the world a better place.” Kim Kluge
