Abraham Kim
Welcome to Season Two of the Korean American Perspectives podcast. My name is Abraham Kim. I’m the Executive Director for the Council of Korean Americans and I’m also your host for this show. This podcast seeks to share the inspirational life stories of Korean American leaders and explore the complex issues that shape this community. On the show, we interview innovators, trailblazers, thought leaders and artists about their lives, their immigration story, their career journeys, and the important issues and challenges that they dedicated their lives to help address.

Abraham Kim
Today we’re pleased to bring you our first interview with Alpin Hong, internationally renowned concert pianist and music education advocate. Alvin’s global performances have earned him a reputation everywhere from Walt Disney Hall to the Julliard school. Alpin’s performances are captivating with emotional range and standing technique. As you’ll see in the upcoming interview. Alpin isn’t your typical classically trained piano virtuoso. He is a person full of life with a captivating personality. This medical school-bound Korean American was persuaded in his college years that music was his destiny and where he would find fulfillment.

Abraham Kim
As you’ll see, Alvin’s life was not all an easy road. In fact, it was filled with tragedy and hardships. He and his younger brother lost both of his parents and became orphans as young boys. Through the generosity of kind people along the way, some grit and a little luck, he survived and was able to finally fulfill his musical dreams. Sit back and join us on this fascinating conversation with Alpin as he shares about his childhood, his music career, and the importance of music education.

Abraham Kim
What an honor it is to be here with my friend Alpin Hong, concert pianist, music educator and innovator. Alpin, welcome to the Korean American Perspectives.

Alpin Hong
Great to be here. Thank you so much, Abe.

Abraham Kim
Let’s start our interview from the beginning. Tell me a little bit about your family, how you got here to the United States. Were you born here?

Alpin Hong
Yes, my mother and father, like many Korean Americans of that generation coming out of postwar South Korea. Both of them were raised in Seoul and after they were married, my father actually immigrated here in 1972 he came here before my mother did because he was trained as an OBGYN in Korea, but for some reason he must’ve realized that it would have been difficult for him to find employment in America because of the sensitive nature of the field. And so he actually went back to the University of Maryland to get a second medical degree in psychiatry. You can only imagine how difficult that must be to get a psychiatric degree in a language, not your own with all of those extra cultural things. But that, strangely enough, may have contributed to my name Alpin, which is obviously not a Korean name or an American name. And I’ve been told that the origin of this was that they were in an arranged marriage in Korea, as many were at that time. My father was notoriously picky and so he got married rather late, 39 years old, I believe he was. And my mother was I think eight years younger than him.

Alpin Hong
And after they got married, as I said before he came to America, my mother went to stay with my father’s family as per custom and they fell in love with her. She was a wonderfully dynamic, beautiful woman. And they asked him, “Do you really know, her name is Myung Im, Lee Myung Im, and my father’s name is Hong Sunghyo.” And they asked her, “Do you know your wife very well?” He said, “Oh yeah, she’s nice”. They did the regular Jeju honeymoon as they all do and they take the pictures next to a bunch of waterfalls. But doesn’t mean they actually know each other very well. And they asked her, “Do you know your husband very well?” And apparently the answer was not sufficient. So they went on a second honeymoon to Switzerland. And my father fell in love with the mountains, seeing the Alps for the first time. So when I was born, I was born in New Jersey. They decided initially to name me Alpine. They asked his younger sister who was living in Los Angeles, “What do you think about the name of Alpine?” She said, “Well, why don’t you drop off the ‘E’? It sounds better, Alpin.” And so here I am out in Hong Kong, and when my younger brother was born, a second son in Korean culture is considered victory so my brother is Victor Hong.

Abraham Kim
Interesting. So tell me about your life in New Jersey, and then you moved to Michigan afterwards.

Alpin Hong
Right. So, I was born in New Jersey and after my younger brother was born, we moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan. I think this was because his best friend who had gone to Koryo Medical School with him back in Korea, was living there at the time in Battle Creek. She obviously told them that there was a wonderful life to be made in Michigan. And so they moved there. And so we’ve spent the first couple of years in Kalamazoo and we ended up moving to Battle Creek, which is where I spent most of my childhood until the time I was 12.

Abraham Kim
So your piano playing was inspired by your parents, I’m assuming?

Alpin Hong
Yeah, growing up, my mother was the more dynamic performer of the two. She was a skilled singer, guitar player, and piano player. She was a figure skater when she was young. She was a model in college. She was a high school basketball coach, a uniquely dynamic woman. Because she was the one that always took us to our lessons and little kid competitions and everything. I always thought it was her that was pushing our music upbringing. But, actually after thinking about it and talking to my extended family about it and my brother and remembering, I distinctly remember that my father loved opera and I’ve just recently inherited a lot of LPs, a collection of LPs that he had of these classic operas. I remember him taking us to see La Traviata when I was maybe six years old. I was obviously too young to understand it, but I thought my exposure to it was really incredible and I remembered it to this day. But what I remember most is that my father was a very reserved, introverted person. As I said before, my mother was this gregarious [person]. She was always inviting the community, you know, for potluck at our house. And then my father was known for hiding in an office even while the party was going on where my mother would have to drag him out saying like, “We’re the hosts, what are you doing?” But he used to listen to opera when he would come home from work. And, you know, we had a record player and he would come in, tired after a long day of work. And then he would put in an opera and he would transform from this very quiet, reserved man of work to this almost operatic hero. He would belt out these arias and he would grab us and tickle us while he was doing it. He would completely transform at home because of this music.

Alpin Hong
And so I do think that this impulse to give us music lessons outside of the normal immigrant push, I think to, to provide their children opportunities they might not have been able to afford in Korea. Private music lessons and things like that. They had a personal love of music that extended beyond that. I think the extent to which they took it was much further than most parents might’ve. For example, at one point my parents felt that I had grown all the music instructors that were in Kalamazoo and Battle Creek at the time. So they looked for a piano teacher of national standing and who was one of the greatest developmental teachers at the time, that they kind of specialize in turning little kids into competition winners. But he happened to live in Chicago, which is a three and a half hours drive away. And my parents would drive me seven hours every Sunday for a two hour lesson, from the time I was 10, through inclement weather and all these kinds of things. So, every day after school I had something music related that we would go to, whether it was orchestra, clarinet lessons, violin lessons, piano lessons. So their investment in it was quite extreme.

Abraham Kim
But did they want you to become, eventually, a professional artist?

Alpin Hong
I would imagine not, what parent does? Certainly they, I think they must have recognized my ability early. I was always told that when I was young, I was able to replicate complex rhythms early and I had a love of performing that was unique to me. Now, this is to say I was not a normal kid. I hated practicing, hated it. I mean, Nintendo entertainment system came out when I was eight. There was no way that Bach, Beethoven and Chopin can compete with Mario and Zelda and Metroid. So I was a very normal kid. I hated practicing. My mom would spank me because I didn’t want to practice. So I was very normal in that way, but I always did love performing and that persisted throughout my life.

Abraham Kim
Your younger brother, was he a musician as well?

Alpin Hong
He.. took lessons— I’m kidding. No, he did take piano and violin and voice lessons. I believe he did trumpet and band in school and he did not enjoy performing as much as I did. I’d say that my younger brother had a personality more akin to my father’s: more introverted, more quiet. He was not as, you know, like rambunctious as I was and not as willing to get up in front of people and play. But he did. He was forced to do all of that stuff with me.

Abraham Kim
Yeah. Well you and your brother’s life changed in 1989 with the death of both of your parents. Can you share with us a little bit about that?

Alpin Hong
Yes. In 1989 in March, both of my parents were killed in a head-on collision and I was 12 years old and my brother was 10 at the time. And I obviously remember that day very distinctively. It was a Friday and my mom, as I said, was religious about picking us up immediately after school to take us to our various musical activities. But that day we were just wandering around campus and because we were raised seventh day Adventist, and of course Friday nights was vespers, the Korean American Seventh Day Adventist church would meet at our school for vespers. Because it was late and my mom hadn’t picked us up. We saw some of them coming. What we thought was for vespers. My father’s friend, as I told you before, Dr. Kim, who had gone to Koryo medical school with him was the first to arrive. And he was the one that told us that our parents had been in an accident and offered to take us home. Now, he told us that our parents were in the hospital. They ended up not telling us what really happened to them until my extended family started coming from Korea. And when my aunt, who was the only other relative on my father’s side who lives in Los Angeles, came to tell us, it was then that she had told us that our parents had passed away immediately. That the fact that we thought that they were in the hospital was actually not true. And that was obviously the fork in my road, in the road of my life, where my identity was destroyed. Up to that point, I had been the little piano kid, growing up in a close-knit church community, going to a Seventh Day Adventist school with only maybe 130 kids from kindergarten to 12th grade and being the little star of the community and wanting and needing nothing. I grew up in an Eden. And in that moment, even where we were going to live was thrown into doubt.

Alpin Hong
Now obviously my Korean extended family wanted us to go to Korea. ? They thought there was more of them to take care of us. They had the financial means to take care of us there. And so they asked us though, these two kids, “where do you want to live?” And I remember talking to my brother and we had a short conversation about it and he had not quite processed what had happened. You know, he was too young to understand that our parents were gone and that we were being asked to define what our life would be from that moment forward. No 10-year-old or even 12-year-old is faced with that question usually. But it’s then that I realized that I told my family this, when I went back into the room where they were waiting for our answer, and I said, even though we look Korean on the outside, inside we’re American because we don’t even speak Korean.

Alpin Hong
My parents, I think like many parents of that generation want us to integrate into American society rather than preserve our Korean identity in America. As you know, a lot of young Koreans might do now like, you know, speaking Korean, all those kinds of things. So, we decided that we want to stay in America. And there was a couple, a teacher at my school. This is a white couple, Pam and Gerald Curtis. The family decided that it would be best for us to finish out our school year so the transition would not be hard. They took us in to their home. They had no children of their own and they watched us for the last few months until it was time. And that summer we moved to LA to be adopted by my father’s youngest sister Sungjin Hong and her husband, Kosovo Nishida in Los Angeles.

Abraham Kim
Tell me how music played into those years, after your parents had passed away.

Alpin Hong
It was one of the few things left intact from my childhood. For example, this piano, which my parents bought me when I was five years old. This Yamaha C7 piano, I’ve learned every single piece I’ve ever learned in my life on this thing. It still sits in my house now. It was like I said, one of the few recognizable things left over from my childhood, right. I was in a new school. I was now in an LA unified public school with over 2000 kids in three grades instead of, you know, 130 from K through 12. The fact that I was in a class now of 700 kids in seventh grade, and this is an LA unified school district, a year or two before the LA riots happened. So there was lots of gang violence. And this is the first time I realized there were more Koreans. I was like, “Wow, there are a lot of us here. There’s a whole Hanguk Town!” And that was something I had never imagined. And my aunt and uncle and my extended family resolved that one thing that they would continue my music classes. So I continued to take violin and piano throughout middle school in high school.

Abraham Kim
From there you went to UCLA. But you gave up music when you went to college and you became a pre-med.

Alpin Hong
Yes. The one thing that did happen with the loss of my parents that I remember very well was I resolved at that age to pursue a life of financial and social security, which of course music is not right. And so it was very easy to fall into that trope of being the son of a doctor to become a doctor myself, of course. And so I resolved to enter UCLA with the intention of going to UCLA medical school and perhaps following my father into medicine, perhaps psychiatry, like he did. And so I entered as a pre-med major and I set out on my path. But obviously it did not end up that way.

Abraham Kim
But you quit piano completely and you got involved in other things to fill the gap where piano had left a void.

Alpin Hong
That’s right. So I stopped taking lessons. I stopped obviously entering competitions and performing concerts and I was a typical pre-med major. Obviously anybody who does that, there’s a significant amount of devoted to studies. And I didn’t realize that there was this gap that I was trying to fill, but my extracurricular activities were things like competitive martial arts and extreme sports, skateboarding, rollerblading, snowboarding. I was directing musical theater at my old high school, summer tours. All of this I realized now was to recapture this thrill of performing and connection to people that I was missing.I was missing this part of myself that, that I realize now, was left over from my childhood, that feeling of specialness that that was an integral part of an identity that I couldn’t live without. And so I tried all these other things and I did a lot of risky behaviors in college too, I think to recapture that thrill that I was missing. And it really came to a head where I was rather depressed. I lost my identity. I was looking around at the other pre-med majors in the library and I was doing okay in my studies. I would have been okay. I might’ve been accepted to medical school if I continue— but I realized this wasn’t me. So I took a career 180 and, actually there’s a great story behind this, because I was not a music major. I was not allowed to play on any of the pianos at school. I was not allowed to enter any of the competitions, you know, or, or performing any of the groups. The only avenue that was open to me was the chorale, the choir at school.

Alpin Hong
Now the story about how I got involved in this. Late at night after one of my late night rollerblading sessions where we would destroy property, you know, by rail sliding on the curbs and the rails. I just found myself Shernburg Hall, the home with the music department, late at night. Of course all the practice rooms are locked, but I passed one of the larger classrooms and I saw that somebody had left the lock open and inside I could see beautiful Steinway and it didn’t have a lock attached. So I just kind of sat down and started playing for myself, you know, in the dark. And I was interrupted by this gentleman behind me, tapped me on the shoulder, this older gentleman, silver hair. His name was Donald Neuen. He’s a legendary director. He used to be the director of the Crystal Cathedral Choir for many years and the LA Master Chorale. And he was the then director of the LA, the UCLA chorale. And he tapped me on the shoulder. He says, “You know, you’re wonderful. Who are you?” I said, “No one.” He said, “Well, that’s wonderful. Would you consider playing? Do you know the Moonlight Sonata?” And I lied. And I said yeah, even though I didn’t, he said, “Would you consider playing it at our upcoming chorale concert?” I said sure. So I learned it after that. And so my first performance in four years was at a huge First Methodist Korean church downtown. There’s about 2000 people in the audience. And it was during an intermission and I played the Moonlight Sonata.

Alpin Hong
But what was really funny was at that piano, the third leg had broken off some point before and somebody had super glued it back on. So in the middle of the piece, it started to shake and then it snapped off in the middle. So the foot of the piano snaps off, the whole thing crashes to the ground, the lid breaks and hits the piano. The whole thing hits the ground of the enormous crash, right? And the whole audience is like, “Omonah, Oh no, no!” You know, lot of Koreans in the audience, and it’s a disaster! Right? And I’m just like, what am I going to do? Is this it? And I thought, you know what, the show must go on, right? So I, you know, I gestured to some of the larger baritones and basses. And I said, “Can you guys help me pick this up?” He picked it up and they put it back on the leg. I said, “Would you guys hold it for me so I can finish?” So a couple of them holding it and I finished the piece and I jumped away from the piano. And then the audience erupted, you know, the best standing ovation. The Korean Consul General happened to be the audience that night. And so a couple of months later I got a call from the Korean government. They were doing a government celebration about the Korean diaspora, so they’re inviting artists and business leaders, you know, from all over the world to come to Korea to celebrate. And one of the capstones was they wanted me to play the Tchaikovsky piano concerto with the KBS symphony on TV. Now remember, I have not been playing for four years. They asked me on the phone, do you know the Tchaikovsky piano concerto? And I said, sure. I had never learned it! So I asked him, “When is this concert?” He’s like, “Oh, it’s a November.” I’m like sure, I have six months. I learned one of the most beloved piano concertos that every Korean knows.

Alpin Hong
It’s like the second Korean national Anthem to people, right? And so I learned this and so my second performance was with the KBS national symphony on TV at this Korean celebration. And that was the performance that made me fall in love with it. I thought maybe I can still pursue a life in music. And as I told you before the interview, I said I had gone into the career center. I was depressed asI told you before. I wanted to see what other jobs I could do with my degree at the time. And I got all these things I was not interested in, but I passed one of the tables. And somebody had left the application to the Julliard school on a table, and nobody seemed to be claiming it. I picked it up and I looked through it. I looked at the requirements for the audition, I wonder if I could still get in here. So I went to my old high school with piano teacher, Mr. Richmond, and I asked him, “Do you think you could help me prepare for the master music audition to Julliard?” And he’s like, “Alpin, I don’t know how realistic this is an expectation. I mean this is, you’re going to be going up against the finest pianos around the world.”

Abraham Kim
For the last four years. You have been a Pre-Med skateboarding rollerblader and now you’re applying for a graduate degree.

Alpin Hong
The Master of Music program at Julliard, right? And so my backup was the Manhattan school of music since I was going to be in town anyway. And so he helped me prepare. And so over a period of a few months, I cobbled together a program. And that’s my audition story, of course. It’s a saga in itself.

Abraham Kim
But the end story of this is that you got into the Master’s Program at Julliard.

Alpin Hong
I fooled the jury. I just wanted to create a picture for who I was at this time. So, I had hair down to the middle of my back at this time, so I looked like a Japanese anime character at this point. I literally skateboarded up to my Julliard audition, which I’m sure the other people were not doing. If there’s something that pianos aren’t supposed to do before, a big audition is skateboard anywhere. So I’m skateboarding through Manhattan, weaving in and out of traffic, you know, from my friend’s apartment to get there. And I show up and I filled the jury as I said, and then they let me in. The funny thing is, a story that comes out of this is that at the time it was 1999. We were about to celebrate the new millennium. Julliard was having a piano retrospective as a series of concerts called Piano Century, taking the last hundred years in piano music. And there was about a hundred pianos at Juilliard, so they were giving every Julliard pianist a piece from every year from 1900 to 2000 to play. And, but there was this one piece apparently that they didn’t know who to give it to. It’s this piece called the Superstar Etude by Aaron J. Curtis. In this piece, you have to play with your feet at the end and sing like Elvis. So literally in the score it says, “Whoa baby, whoa baby.” And they didn’t know who to give this to. And apparently Bruce B. Baker, who was the modern guru of piano music at the time that was setting up this concert series. When I auditioned, he said, let’s give it to that guy. And so first years are not actually supposed to play on any public Julliard concert by tradition because obviously they want you to be climatized and they don’t want to put you on the spot, you know, just having newly been there. But they take a risk and give it to me. And so the first piece they give me, they were like, can you play this piece, the Superstar Etude? And looking at it as like, Oh, play chords with feet, sing, “Whoa baby” in the style of Elvis. I was like, “Yeah, I’ll do it.” And so I did that concert with my hair dyed blue. So I had this long hair. I dyed it blue for the concert. I wore a tux from the 70s, which was powder blue with the huge bow tie and the ruffles, you know, from that era. And I had white platform shoes and I got my first New York Times review and the reviewer said, “Alpin Hong went over the top, down the other side and way over the top again.” So I established this reputation at the school of being this weird, long haired, pianist that was willing to take on and do these experiments where maybe a lot of the pianists weren’t doing. And obviously that spirit of experimentation has persisted even today.

Abraham Kim
Yeah. No, it sounds like you took a lot of risks from a young age and life is about risk taking and moving forward.

Alpin Hong
Yeah. You asked, prior to the interview, whether or not I’m an adrenaline junkie and it turns out that I am, which is obviously not a good spec to being a father and a husband. But yes, the thrill-seeking part of that has defined my artistic image today. And, it’s the part that I most enjoy.

Abraham Kim
So you were at Julliard from 1999 to 2001 and obviously one of the big milestones for all of us who lived in New York during that period was 9/11. Correct. You’ve actually mentioned this in some of your public performances that during that time of 9/11, you were actually preparing Gershwin Rhapsody in blue, which took on a new meaning after 9/11. Talk to us about that.

Alpin Hong
Yeah, absolutely. Well, it turns out it’s so funny, our lives, me and Abraham here, our lives and intersected in more ways than one. Apparently we were both living in New York, during 9/11. And a lot of people remember that event obviously through watching it on TV, but you and I experienced it personally. I was living up in Inwood at the time, which is a 200th and Broadway, up in the northern end of Manhattan. But I just think, I remember being woken up by my uncle from Korea called me from overseas because he had seen on the news. There had been a terrible plane accident. He was concerned about my safety. Now I remember turning on the TV at that moment to see just a second plane come out of nowhere and hit the second tower, and then of course I went out of my apartment to see the smoke beginning to rise. And obviously me and my other friends that are up there, our first instinct was, well, what do we do? Obviously we’re watching what’s happening. Then we thought, well, maybe we can go donate blood at the local hospital. As we all know, because of that tragedy, there was not as much need for that because the casualties were always fatal. But then like many times, you know the shock of all this happening and realizing what had happened afterwards.

Alpin Hong
What stuck with me during that time was how New York and America united after that. Now New York of course is known as the city that never sleeps. I say unlike cities like LA where because there’s more space, people could live in their neighborhoods, you could have Koreatown in Little Tokyo, in Filipino Town and an Italian town, and because you’re in your car, you don’t necessarily have to interact with each other. But of course New Yorkers were in each other’s face all the time. And so that cross cultural connection is happening constantly. But what was amazing was how that city came together after that. And in response obviously to a national tragedy and the shock for most Americans, even those who had lived through two World Wars and Vietnam and Korea, this was the first attack on our soil. And I think for those of us at that generation to understand America’s relationship with the rest of the world changed at that time. And so as you mentioned before, I was learning Rhapsody in Blue and of course up to that point it just been like, “Oh, it’s this popular song that everybody knows.” It’s the piece that stands in between classical music and American classical music, which is jazz, right? It is the one classical art that is uniquely American, which is jazz. And of course living in New York and being close to Harlem at the time, I was even living in Spanish Harlem, that piece lay right at the kind of the center of that Venn diagram of Western classical music and modern jazz music.

Alpin Hong
But after that, I started a month before I graduated Julliard. I entered my first piano competition, the Concert Artists Guild competition. I fooled the jury, they gave me first prize. I played that Superstar Etude as my audition piece, in fact. And it was really funny, that the competition was held at the Baldwin Piano Company and there happened to be a tour of the directors of that company at the time. So they were looking in at the audition. So here I am, I’m kicking their piano with the bottom of my foot and then I turn and I sing like Elvis to the judges and the Baldwin people are like, what is going on here? This is not what we sanctioned when we said you could have, you know, the, the final round here. Anyway, the end of that was that they gave me first prize. It gave me my Carnegie Hall debut, my first recording and three years of commission free management, which launched my career and started, started me on my first tour and Rhapsody in Blue became my calling card. So, one of my first tours, I visited over 30 states in eight months and I played over 90 concerts in 30 states. So I went to almost every corner and just fly somewhere, play, fly somewhere, play. I played in almost every corner of the United States and I got a perspective of what America was. Meeting the people in South Carolina and Montana and Ohio and Hawaii, and really getting a perspective of who America really was because I wasn’t playing necessarily. I did play in a few big cities, but most of it was small towns.

Alpin Hong
Now, Rhapsody In Blue has continued to be kind of my calling card and I’m performing today at the World Bank, in fact. And the reason why it’s special to me is that, I think that when you listen to Rhapsody in Blue, every section of it portrays America and the feeling of it. There’s this very percussive part that reminds you of the A train. You know, there are others that sound like, you know, dadada da da da da da. I mean, it sounds like the amber waves of grain when the sun rises, you know, in middle America, right? Or big sky in Montana, one of those wonderful, expansive sunsets that you see there. And so that’s why it’s become very special to me. And every time I play it, no matter where I play it in any corner of this country, people connect to it. Kids, older adults, there’s something, there’s this unifying element to this uniquely American piece that persists. And that’s why I think it’s very special to me because of the experience I’ve had playing it throughout the country.

Abraham Kim
Let’s take a little piece of what you said about how music connects with people and it, you not only went into performance, but you also went into music education and I connected with a lot of young people with your music. Talk to us a little bit about that, how you got involved in education.

Alpin Hong
Well, that started actually while I was at Julliard. So while I was at Julliard, I was performing around and we’d go to hese student performances and I was going to Lincoln Center to see the opera and the symphony for the first time in my life. And I was looking at the audience and the audiences, the classical audience you would expect. They were all, you know, older audience and there were very few young people in the audience. And so I immediately thought, well where are the younger people? Like, why aren’t they coming in the audience, outside of obviously the prohibitively high costs of a symphony ticket or the fact that there are just many other things to do, right?

Alpin Hong
One of the projects that I got involved in after I won that competition, we started this program called Kitchen Sink Music. It was an after-school program in Harlem, where kids from at risk families would come because there was no safe environment to go to after school. And so what we would do is we would, we would help them with their homework. We play games with them, we would spend time with them, but we’d also decided to teach them to sing and play instruments. Obviously we were doing recorders and the types of things that you can afterwards, but we would teach them how to play violin. We would have other Julliard students come in and perform for them so they could see what it was like. And so one of the things that we were able to do is we taught them how to sing. We all taught them to sing a song. And this is one of the most memorable experiences I had. We had a coffee shop performance where we had that. We just rented out a coffee shop and we had all the kids sing their songs. They had their parents come to see them. And one of the kids that we taught, her mother was in prison at the time. But we managed to get her a release for the day so she could come see her daughter sing. And after that performance, I remember this mother came up to me, her face in tears because she had no idea her daughter possessed this talent because her daughter was the star. And this daughter first started as the most introverted, quiet, didn’t say a word, but I remember one time hearing her sing on her own when she didn’t think we were listening. And it was awesome. This girl was like a young Aretha. And so we gave her the solo part to sing. So after this, her mother came to me just absolutely overwhelmed. She said, “Thank you for giving my daughter this chance to shine”.

Alpin Hong
And that obviously made a massive impression on me. I thought, you know, this is what music is about. It is not necessarily to make the next generation of performing artists, but what it does in people’s lives to give them pride, to give them connection, to give them community self-confidence. When sometimes our family background doesn’t afford that or their financial background may not be able to afford that. This is something unique to the arts that needs to be given to anyone that we could do. What I’m so grateful for is that a lot of the presenters that presented me those early years, they also valued this idea of arts education. And so they would have me do outreach concerts at convalescent homes at hospitals and at schools. And so I developed this outreach program that introduced classical music through popular TV and movie and video game themes that all kids knew. And this, I later named it “Movies to Games, Classically Trained”. And this absolutely caught on fire. It became something that every presenter insisted on me doing. So this idea of me, arts education became inseparable from my concert career and has grown to be equal to or maybe even more so more important and what I’m known for even more than my typical classical piano concerts.

Abraham Kim
So you talked about how the arts inspire and connects the mind and the heart together in education. But, it also plays an important role problem solving too because it engages so many parts of your brain and it’s as someone once put it, you know, music or playing the piano is both art and science, right. Absolutely. Playing of notes. But how you play those notes, what volume, at what speed and different things really expresses by one’s choice. An artist’s choice, brings out a new interpretation of that music. The same piece of music could come out completely different. So, speak a little bit about that in terms of the problem solving and how it engages in a very interdisciplinary learning process.

Alpin Hong
Yes. As we know, anybody who has taken an instrument learn to sing, play an instrument, you know that there’s probably few human activities that can approach the complexity of a piano concerto for example. The number of simultaneous things that have to happen physically, intellectually, emotionally at once. And then to play it with 60 or 70 other people who are also doing that at the same time. Obviously things like the Superbowl maybe, you know, approach that level, like I said, of what’s going on. But anybody who has done that, as you said, it is a language. It’s learning another language that has a very complex system of notation and interpretation that you have to know. But it engages so many different parts of the brain and science has actually born that theory out that we all knew that, you know, music was good for kids, right? That’s why some people used to put speakers, headphones on their mom’s belly and they’d play like Mozart and Bach for them cause it would make their kids smarter. I don’t know if that actually is true, but what they have done is that they’ve done research into what the arts do for a young child’s developing brain. And what it does is that the experience of learning music allows young children to filter out background noise. So all of our brains have a certain amount of background noise. It’s like, it literally shows up as static. If you do brain scans and they found that kids that take music, learn music, and perform music, are able to filter out those signals and to mute that background noise so that they can take incoming sensory information more clearly.

Alpin Hong
Now that is the very basis of learning, right? For you to be able to take in new information, process it and learn, right and develop, you know, whether or not it’s math, science, English, whatever it might be. And so that, that advantage of somebody who learns an art form, it literally rewires your brain to be able to process information more efficiently. And as we know, so much of our success in our field still depends on interpersonal interactions. This idea of being able to communicate with someone maybe for the first time, the music, the very fact that it is so community-based, yes, pianos, we do play music on our own. But from the very beginning we’re encouraged to accompany singers and maybe play for dancers or violinists, you know, they’ll play in a quartet. And that kind of, that kind of communication that you learn in that process, you can apply to almost any other field. For example, a lot of the most creative people in the tech world including Bill Gates and Bezos, and Steve Jobs, they were all classically trained musicians when they were young. I think there is something to be said for the fact that they have that common background experience that applies today. And I think right now, especially with the emphasis being on STEM education, of course the people use STEAM now that the arts has to be critical component even in the new industries of science, technology, engineering and math. That allows us to connect and utilize that information and to be able to use it in the real world.

Abraham Kim
I’m curious what goes on in Alpin’s mind when you’re playing some of these long pieces. I mean, you’re so expressive, you’re so emotional, passionate, and obviously you’re not reading music. You’re writing from memory. I’m wondering what you’re thinking while you’re playing.

Alpin Hong
This is really funny. I have to say the honest image that comes a lot that flits through my brain in the depths of my music making is Batman, Batman swooping through the skies. I don’t know, driving the Batmobile, fighting off the criminals. I don’t know why that is an adult level image. It’s maybe because I have a huge comic book geek and video game nerd. And like I said, you know, that educational outreach program was based on those kind of geek things that I loved and I use that, you know, of course those kinds of things have gone mainstream, right? When we were growing up, it was kind of the beginning of video games, the Nintendo entertainment systems that came out when I was eight. As I said before, and of course now the Marvel and DC universe cinematic universe, there’s right now that’s the movie industry has become. So it’s been interesting that all these things that Dungeons and dragons and all these things, that firmly nerd and geek culture, has become mainstream culture. But it becomes another common language I think that people share. And so I think that’s a wonderfully unifying thing of, you know, Star Wars of course is one of those things. Not everybody knows Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony but everyone knows Darth Vader’s theme. Bah bah bah, bum babah, bum babah.

Alpin Hong
And the very fact that we have that common language that transcends, you know, different languages that we speak around the world, that we have, this unified language of music is so powerful. And that’s why I think the arts as a way of translating common pursuits, especially in our increasingly interconnected world, is extremely powerful.

Abraham Kim
Do you have a favorite artist? Is there something that when you relax, you like to listen to?

Alpin Hong
Yeah. It’s not who you would think either. I love Daft Punk. Somebody had asked me on another, the only other podcast I’ve ever done, what artists I would love to collaborate with, it would be daft punk. I think we would make something awesome together. So I love a lot of those techno DJs. DJ Tiesto, Paul van Dyk. I moved to LA at the height of gangster rap and hip hop. So I grew up with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg and Biggie Smalls and Tupac and of course, you know, Grunge Rock, Nirvana, Pearl Jam Stone, Temple Pilots. One of the first CDs I got was Led Zeppelin, the Remastered. So that’s probably my favorite rock band is Led Zeppelin. And, I’m a huge fan of the Foo Fighters. I love reggae. Obviously Marley and the Wailers, you know, it was close to me. And right now I’m trying to pursue jazz and like Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson and those kinds of grades like that. So, yeah, I’m a huge fan of a lot of things that aren’t classical music. In fact, I probably on average listen to very little classical music.

Abraham Kim
I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about your Korean American identity and how you got involved with the community.

Alpin Hong
Yes! Thanks to you! In part.

Abraham Kim
Yes. So tell me about how you first got reengaged with the Korean American community.

Alpin Hong
Well, the Korean community has, I said from the loss of my parents, they came in a huge way. The first was my church and we had talked about how we had these common people that we know from Glendale Korean Church. Now this is the church I attended after I moved to Los Angeles. My extended family, my aunt and uncle that were raising me felt like it was important for me to continue with my affiliation at the church that I had been baptized into. And they were so supportive of me. I mean, I remember when I got into Julliard to help me with my housing that I couldn’t afford, they sent me a check every month so that I could pay for my housing in New York City. That community has supported me in ways that, you know, that extended far beyond. They were my original fans. I used to, when I would play concerts in LA, the church would come out in force and be in my audience. And that has continued even through Julliard. So one of the things that happened there was a family, the Lee family, that heard one of my concerts. And at first they wanted me just to teach their kids piano. So while I was in college, I used to teach their son piano and I would go to their home in Northridge and teach him and the mother, presented me in concert in Koreatown. and what happened from that was, there was a gentleman named Steve Kim, who’s the founder of Alcatel Ventures. He heard me in concert and I had an interview afterwards and he wanted to support me. And so he actually helped me pay for my first year at Julliard. And so he became a patron of mine. And through him I met people of the Korean American Scholarship Foundation. And that was one of the organizations that I’ve been affiliated with. It’s been my honor and privilege to have been a keynote speaker for them at their annual conference and their national conference in D.C. but also in Atlanta and Los Angeles and they’ve continued to be sponsors of mine and support us even today. So that’s been an organization that I’ve wanted to give back to. And so I’ve donated a lot of my time and performance to them over the years. And as you know, we have many mutual contacts and that’s probably one of the things that introduces us to each other.

Alpin Hong
Now, I remember very distinctly you calling me out of the blue, maybe seven or so years after we initially met, in order to invite me and have a conversation about CKA, of course, which you now lead. And that experience of what we’ve done together, you know, creating the Empower Summit, which happened last year, has reintroduced back into my Korean family in a way that I could not have expected, but in such incredible ways. The Korean community, as I said, was largely based around the church, during my parents organization. And over breakfast this morning, you illuminated to me why it was that the pastors or the elders usually were the ones, they were social leaders, not only in a religious way, but in a social way. They’re the ones that were able to help do things for new immigrants coming in that they weren’t able to do on their own. There was no Asian American network to show new incoming Korean immigrants “How do you apply for a driver’s license? You know, how do you apply for a bank loan? How do you apply for a bank account?” right, in a language that was not their own. And these pastors and elders help them do that.

Alpin Hong
So there was, like I said, I belong to a very small Korean American community church community. And now, of course Koreans have been here, we’re on their second and third generations here, and we’ve kind of gone, you know, spread out a little bit. There have obviously more of us than ever have been, but you know, these church communities. Maybe they still exist of course, but they’re not the only place where Korean Americans, you know, congregate. And so we have a generation now that we’re a little bit detached from that. My wife is not Korean. I am the first male in my Korean family to not marry a Korean Protestant Christian girl. And so my friendship circle has very few Koreans in it. I went to a high school where a lot of my friends are Jewish, or White or African American or Hispanic American. And so I didn’t even practice Korean and speak in Korean until recently when I came back. But what’s been amazing is that coming back into the Korean community, to understand that there’s these underlying threads that still bind us together, whether it’s the Korean mom, whether it’s learning music when we’re young. But again, there’s these cultural threads that bind that even if we don’t live with them every day, they still connect us and they’re still very powerful.

Abraham Kim
So as a parent, obviously your children are multiracial, biracial. How do you, how do you teach that to your kids?

Alpin Hong
Some of it I don’t actively teach. Well first of all, the value of giving them piano lessons at a young age. And I started my son when he was four and, you know, I always told myself that I wouldn’t turn into my mom, cause my mom would like spank us if we didn’t practice, you know. I would cry at the piano bench and I wanted to quit and all these kinds of things. She would pinch us, you know, and punish us if we had a bad lesson and I told myself, I am not going to do this. Like I don’t want to repeat that, but still I can’t help it. When a lot of people ask me, do you teach your children piano? I’m like Oh no. Because if I taught my kids piano, I would kill the love of music in them for the rest of their lives. I’m so rough on them, I’m so impatient with them, I make my children cry almost every practice session.

Alpin Hong
So I’m so glad that I found a wonderful teacher who is not me to teach them. But I think one thing that I have passed along to them is this Korean value of excellence in everything. Whatever you’re going to do, you have to do it to the best of your ability. The other thing that I think is a Korean value is long term goals that you study now. And you may not see the benefits of long hours of study and practice, but you will. It will lead to success later on. That, I think, is something kind of uniquely Korean American about it, which is why we start our children in things so young, right before they have a choice. You know, some other parents might be like, you know, the kid might ask them, I would like to have piano lessons, but most kids won’t ask for that maybe until middle school or high school, right? But we start them before they have a choice and then, you know, so that they have black belts in TaeKwonDo by the time they’re 10, right? And my son is taking TaeKwonDo too. And what I’ve found, you know, the fact that it’s a Korean martial art, his master is not Korean, but you know, the tradition of having an authority figure, an unquestionable authority figure in the TaeKwonDo master. That immediate obedience of someone who is not their parent. And I think there’s something that is very valuable about Korean culture is that we revere teachers, right? There’s this idea of instant respect for your elders and respect for the traditions that they are teaching to you. That is something I think is very valuable that I’m passing onto my children even when I can’t pass along the Korean language.

Abraham Kim
So the final question is if you could speak to your 18-year-old self again, what would you share with the 18-year-old Alpin Hong?

Alpin Hong
Let me answer this in two parts. Only recently, we talked about the loss of my parents and how that was the fork in the road for me. I was thinking to myself, would I change who I am now to have my parents back? Would I choose that as my alternate timeline to have my parents back? And I am so blessed and so lucky to have the family that I have, to have the job that I have, to have the friends that I have, that I realize now I would not give it up even to have them back. That that tragedy I experienced early, not to say that there was an overriding purpose, but challenges like that make us who we are. If we don’t go through the fire of loss and disappointment and failure, then we don’t appreciate success when it happens or when we pursue it. And so if I talked to my 18-year-old self, who is going to be a doctor because that’s who he was supposed to be, I would tell him, “Be not afraid. Be not afraid because of the love you have around you and the family that you have.” And I’m not talking about your immediate family, I’m talking about the Korean community, right? As being one of the families I’ve talked about because of that family that we have, Korean Americans like myself, we have this net that can catch us when we fall and will celebrate with us when we succeed. And so I think that CKA’s vision of bringing that family together is one of the most important things we can be doing for the next century. So I really, really support and applaud your efforts to do this. And it is an honor and privilege to be associated with you.

Abraham Kim
Well, great. Thank you very much, Alpin, for sharing your life with us and just opening up your thoughts and inspiration to us. So thank you very much for what you do.

Alpin Hong
Thank you Abe.

Abraham Kim
I hope you enjoyed this interview with Alpin Hong. His compelling message around the importance of music education and the critical nature of embracing failure to enjoy happiness are rare insights coming from a wise teacher who is no stranger to life’s hardship. Thank you for listening to the first episode of our second season of the Korean American Perspectives. We have a lot more interviews to showcase, so please subscribe to our podcast and visit councilka.org for more interviews, this episode’s show notes, and more. Make sure to give us a five-star rating if you like what you hear. Thanks!