Hope Lee

Hope Lee received formal music training at the McGill University in Montréal and at the Staatlich Hochschule für Musik Freiburg, Germany as a recipient of a DAAD scholarship and a Canada Council Grant. Her main teachers in composition are Bengt Hambraeus, Brian Cherney and Klaus Huber. During this period, she also attended the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik and the Durham 1979 Oriental Music Festival in England. While living in Berkeley, California, she studied Chinese traditional music and poetry, as well as computer music. Since 1990 Lee has been living and composing in Calgary, Alberta. Hope Lee exploits instruments imaginatively and in unusual combinations, creating colourful and evocative sonorities. Born in Taiwan of mainland Chinese parents, she began studying piano at five and moved to Canada in 1967. Her ethnic and scientific background and her literary, philosophical and other interdisciplinary interests have greatly enriched her work. Aptly described by Michael Schulman as a “cross-cultural explorer,“ she is always exploring new sounds and structures, and striving for constant growth, both within individual works and in her output as a whole. Lee‘s work has been presented at international music festivals and can be heard on Centrediscs, Attacca, Aurait, SNE and UNICAL recording labels. Since 1979, Lee has researched into ancient Chinese poetry, music history, theory, and in particular the ideology, philosophy and notation of guquin (Chinese 7-string zither) music. The knowledge absorbed and material collected have integrated and become an important part of her creative voice and up-to-date, she has completed nine pieces in a projected eleven-pieces cycle: The complete catalogue of Lee’s works is published by Furore-Verlag in Germany.

More information about Hope Lee

Link to the Canadian Music Centre

“Hope Lee is achieving a milestone – her 60th birthday.
I have known her for perhaps half of those years and, over the course of that time frame, I have been blessed to witness her personal and artistic development. Personal enhancement is only possible if the family environment is anchored. She has been surrounded by her wonderfully talented husband David Eagle, her beautiful daughter Claire, her supportive pleasant mother and the rest of her extended family. Hope Lee is the centre-piece in a loving, caring environment. She is at peace with the universe, and her
music and philosophy reflect her awareness and sensitivity to ubiquity, yesterday, today and tomorrow.
Large scale cyclical works such as Voices in Time with In the Beginning was the End for harpsichord and accordion, evolve through the galaxies until resolution in the final piece And the End is the Beginning for solo accordion. Her choice of instruments is precise, reflecting personalities individualized through colour, and texture, designed precisely to support movement in space and time. She chiseled her subject matter into miniatures that are cemented in a kaleidoscope of transformations, seeking attachment to other delineated sound sources. The development of her material is organized and controlled by her immense imagination viewed under a microscope, surgically manipulated with careful precision, thereby achieving a magnificent language and voice truly her own. In this massive cycle Voices in Time, one of an extensive compositional catalogue, she reveals her inspiration and I quote her: “The work is based on a central concept in Chinese philosophy that ‘heaven, earth and men are one’; music is a reflection of nature and is able to transform human feelings in time . . . each sound interacts with the ensemble and
is transformed throughout, connecting one’s aural sense, stimulated by the sounds of nature from the outer world, to one’s inner sensibility represented by the instrumental sounds…the aural transformation of sound suggests emotional territories, whether innocence, longing for the unattainable, suffering for the forever lost. . . It is a song of all voices, yours and mine, present and past.”
Hope Lee’s voice is a discriminating one, complex and personal, truly significant, revealing an important, unique Canadian composer. Hope – Happy Birthday.”
-Joseph Macerollo O.C.

More about Hope Lee here
Foto: Neil Spears