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The new music quartet performed Lee’s piece, which was commissioned by the ensemble, along with the premiere of David Smooke’s A Baby Bigger Grows Than Up Was at the Peabody Conservatory. See the link below for Tim Smith’s preview of the concert in the Baltimore Sun.

Lee was a Composition Fellow at the Bowdoin International Music Festival over the summer where he studied with Derek Bermel. Lee had three performances at the festival, his string quartet Three Images, his bass quartet Out of Step, and the premiere of a new work written and rehearsed in 48 hours, Chasing Eden.

Led by conductor Stephen Mulligan, members of the Winston-Salem Symphony performed the first and third movements of Liftoff to inaugurate the new park in Winston-Salem’s Innovation Quarter. The exciting program also featured works by Judd Greenstein, Sarah Kirkland Snyder, and Missy Mazzoli.

Conductor Norman Huynh led the Maine All-State Orchestra in a performance of the second movement of Nocturnal along with Respighi’s Pines of Rome. Lee was able to attend the rehearsals, giving some of the talented high schoolers their first experience of working with a living composer.

Lee won the grand prize in PARMA’s 2015 Student Composition Contest for his orchestral work Janus Antics. The piece will be read by the Moravian Philharmonic in the Czech Republic later this summer, and the score will be featured in an anthology on PARMA’s website.

The new music quartet loadbang premiered Lee’s newest work, Do Your Job and Keep Your Mouth Shut: The Tiger Oil Memos at the National Opera Center in New York City. The ensemble commissioned the work after Lee received an Honorable Mention in their 2014 Call for Scores. The piece adapts a series of memos from Edward “Tiger Mike” Davis, CEO of the now-defunct Tiger Oil Company, to his employees, painting a picture of a compassionless despot bent on maximizing profits with cold efficiency.

Pop superstar Ben Folds and new music ensemble yMusic premiered Lee’s arrangement of Folds’s hit song “Army” at Baldwin Auditorium at Duke University. The arrangement will be performed dozens of times on their upcoming international tour.

Lee is honored to be the recipient of a 2015 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award for his piece Bottom Heavy. The award encourages developing music creators during the earliest stages of their careers. Lee will be presented with the award at a ceremony at the DiMenna Center in New York City in May.

The Da Capo Chamber Players read and recorded a number of student pieces as part of their residency at Duke University this Fall. Lee’s Bottom Heavy was written for the ensemble, augmenting their “pierrot” instrumentation with drum set. The piece is inspired by Trap music, a sub-genre of hip-hop, wedding groove to melodies both angular and smooth.

Nocturnal is Lee’s newest and most ambitious orchestral work to date. The Occasional Symphony commissioned the work and premiered it on May 2 on the Johns Hopkins University Medical Campus alongside Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The piece is in two movements, and evokes the happenings of night. Serene melodies and sounds of mischief from the first movement gradually become depraved in the second, evolving into a wild and relentless dance whose ruthless pulse seems to extend the boundaries of night beyond the break of dawn.