Thomas Oboe Lee
Thomas Oboe Lee was born in China and lived in São Paulo, Brazil, for six years before coming to the United States in 1966. After graduating from the University of Pittsburgh, he studied composition with William Thomas McKinley, George Russell and Gunther Schuller at the New England Conservatory; with Betsy Jolas at Tanglewood; and Earl Kim at Harvard University. He has been a member of the music faculty at Boston College since 1990.
Mr. Lee has received many awards for his work, among them the Rome Prize Fellowship, the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, two Guggenheim Fellowships, two National Endowment for the Arts Composers Fellowships, two Massachusetts Artists Fellowships, First Prize at the Kennedy Center Friedheim Awards for his String Quartet No. 3 ... "child of Uranus, father of Zeus," the Georges Enesco International Composition Prize, and the Koussevitzky Tanglewood Composition Prize. He has also received recording grants from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund and the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, and held residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony and the Charles Ives Center in Danbury, CT and Charleston, SC.
In 1984, Esquire magazine selected him as one of two composers in its First Annual Register, "The Best Of The New Generation: Men and Women Under 40 Who Are Changing America." He has received numerous commissions, among them Amnesty International USA, the American Jazz Philharmonic, the Boston Landmarks Orchestra, the Boston Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, the Civic Symphony Orchestra of Boston, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, the Omaha Symphony Orchestra, and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Additional orchestral performances include those by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Charleston Symphony, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and the American Composers Orchestra.
Mr. Lee is also active as a jazz flutist.
FROM THE COMPOSER
" Minnelieder an got "
For this commission I wanted to use texts by a woman poet. A poet friend, Elizabeth Kirschner, turned me on to a book entitled, "Women in Praise of the Sacred". In it I found this beautiful poem by Mechthild von Magdeburg (1208-82):
"I cannot dance, Lord, unless you lead me."
It piqued my curiosity about her. Mechthild von Magdeburg lived in 13th century Germany. For most of her life she was a Beguine. As Saint Teresa d'Avila did in 16th century Spain, Mechthild wrote her "confessions" to her superior, or parish priest. Her writing was compiled as "Da fliessende Licht der Gottheit" in seven volumes. It was written not in Latin as was the custom, but in the vernacular German of the time.
When I discovered that other composers have set that poem about the dancing Lord, I decided to see if there were other poems just as intriguing and evocative. So, I bought her book, both in German and in the original Mitteldeutsch. I also bought one that was translated into English by Frank Tobin, "The Flowing Light of the Godhead". Among all these sources I began to look for poems that would make a nice set, a song cycle.
The more I got into the project, the more I felt I should set her poems in the original Mitteldeutsch. Fortunately, Michael Resler, a colleague at Boston College where I teach, is an expert in Mitteldeutsch. With his help and his own translation of the text, I found a nice set of six poems that could be summed up as a tripartite entity. - Thomas Oboe Lee
