“At the height of the pandemic last year, Bedminster [NJ] pianist Min Kwon was struggling to remember why making music was important,” writes Tammy La Force in Tuesday’s (6/29) New Jersey Monthly. “Her husband, Leonard Lee, Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital chairman of surgery, was in a Covid-19 battle zone…. ‘It made me feel useless. I was thinking, There’s got to be something I can do, too.’ There was. Last year, Kwon, a piano professor at Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts, began piecing together what would become ‘America/Beautiful,’ a project showcasing 70 diverse interpretations of ’America the Beautiful.’ The result premieres July 4 via livestream (available with daily renditions through July 7). It ends with live events July 8–9 at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. The goal is to reflect on contemporary America, the country Kwon adopted as a child more than 30 years ago, when her parents moved to Closter [NJ] from Korea…. She … enlisted Pulitzer Prize winners, including Melinda Wagner, and MacArthur geniuses like Vijay Iyer to contribute their variations.… ‘America the Beautiful’ was composed in 1882 by organist and choirmaster Samuel A. Ward at Newark’s Grace Episcopal Church, where some of the filming for the livestream took place.”
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