Earl Kim was an American composer born in Dinuba, California, to Korean immigrant parents. He studied at UCLA and the University of California, Berkeley, working with Arnold Schoenberg, Ernest Bloch and Roger Sessions. After serving as an intelligence officer in the Army Air Forces during World War II, he taught at Princeton from 1952 to 1967 and at Harvard from 1967 to 1990, where he became James Edward Ditson Professor of Music. His music often places expressive weight on concise gestures and silence, particularly in works inspired by Samuel Beckett. His collaborators included Itzhak Perlman, Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He also helped establish Musicians Against Nuclear Arms.