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The Boston College Music Department celebrates accomplished faculty member Thomas Oboe Lee — a prominent Chinese-American composer and highly regarded professor marking his 20th anniversary at the University this academic year — with two campus concerts that will premiere his works.
March 31 at 7 p.m. will be a performance of three Lee compositions: “Part the First: THOU mastering me God!” based on texts by renowned Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ; “De Profundis,” drawn from Oscar Wilde’s prison poem to Lord Alfred Douglas; and “String Quartet No. 12: The Seasons, after Franz Joseph Haydn.”
The concert, with soprano Megan Stapleton, baritone Tim Krol and the QX String Quartet, will take place in Gargan Hall of Bapst Library.
Gargan Hall also will be the setting April 7, for the Boston premiere of the song cycle “Vincent Millay Cycle.” The featured performer will be Lee’s former student soprano Mary Hubbell ’97, for whom he wrote the piece — based on the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay — as part of her Doctor of Musical Arts recital in New York City. The concert, which begins at 4:30 p.m., is being presented as part of the “Music in the Afternoon” series. Both events are free and open to the public.
Lee’s credits span more than 135 works, including seven symphonies, 12 string quartets, concerti for various solo instruments, choral works, song cycles, scores of chamber works and a 100-minute two-act chamber opera. Among the honors he has received are two Guggenheim fellowships, two National Endowment for the Arts Composers fellowships, two Massachusetts Artists fellowships, the Koussevitzky Tanglewood Composition Prize, First Prize at the Kennedy Center Friedheim Awards, and recording grants from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Music Fund and the Aaron Copland Fund for Music.
He has had works commissioned by major organizations such as Amnesty International USA, the Thoreau Society, American Jazz Philharmonic, Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston, and Boston Landmarks Orchestra. His music has been recorded on Nonesuch, Koch International Classics, Catalyst BMG, MCA Classics, Arsis, GM Recordings, Northeastern and BMOP Sound. Born in China, Lee left with his family following the Communist take-over in 1949, living in Hong Kong until he moved to Brazil in 1959, where he began his musical education as a jazz flutist playing with renowned musicians. Emigrating to the US in 1966, he continued his education at the University of Pittsburgh, the New England Conservatory of Music and Harvard University. In 1990, he joined the BC Music faculty, teaching courses in music theory, harmony, counterpoint and composition; he also has served as department chair.
“In addition to being one of the very few American scholars who have received two Guggenheim Fellowships, Tom has been and continues to be a truly gifted teacher who has now inspired generations of Boston College students,” said Music Department co-founder and former chair Rev. T. Frank Kennedy, SJ, who holds the University’s Canisius Chair and directs its Jesuit Institute.
Adds current Music Department Chair and Professor Michael Noone: “Tom is an astonishingly versatile and complete musician who has touched the lives of BC students in myriad ways over the past two decades.” He is “a wonderfully gifted and extraordinarily prolific creative force whose works are known and loved far beyond BC’s walls.”
Hubbell, who after BC went on to earn degrees from the University of California at Santa Barbara and the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, said she found Lee’s St. Vincent Millay piece “profound and moving” and praised his “sensitivity and intelligence” in setting the poems to music.
“Learning and performing this song cycle has proven to be one of the most fulfilling projects of my career, and I am truly honored,” said Hubbell, currently a student in voice at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and a faculty member of the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music.
For more on Thomas Oboe Lee, see his website.