Rebecca Kim received her Ph.D. in historical musicology from Columbia University. Her publications on postwar experimentalism appear in Contemporary Music Review, October, MusikTexte, American Music and Current Musicology. Excerpts from her dissertation “In No Uncertain Musical Terms: The Cultural Politics of John Cage’s Indeterminacy” (George Lewis, advisor) are included in 2012 centennial publications on Cage.
She is the editor of Beyond Notation: The Music of Earle Brown (University of Michigan Press, 2017), the first scholarly collection on Brown and based on a conference she organized at Northeastern University in collaboration with The Earle Brown Music Foundation and Callithumpian Consort.
Her research has been supported by grants and commissions from the Getty Research Institute, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Earle Brown Music Foundation and the Society for American Music. She was also an invited opera reviewer for New York Arts: An International Journal for the Arts. She received her undergraduate degree from Wellesley College, graduating with the Billings Performance Prize and the Anne Louise Barrett Fellowship in music history, and attended New England Conservatory Preparatory School as a clarinetist, receiving full fellowships to the Banff and Sarasota summer music festivals.
Rebecca currently studies gayageum, a 12-string Korean zither. Previously she taught music history at Williams College, Northeastern University and Columbia University, and a course on postwar music and art at The Museum of Modern Art.