“I am a combination of the present and the past. As my childhood influences and musical influences became absorbed as knowledge, eventually I felt that what is important is how I want to express myself in a piece.” (Musicworks 75. P 8)
Hope Lee is a composer and pianist, who has been composer-in-residence at the University of Calgary, Queen’s University, and Wuhan Conservatory of Music in China. She studied composition at McGill University and at Staatlich Hochschule für Musik Freiburg in Germany (with Klaus Huber). She also studied computer music at UC Berkeley, California. Lee has been influenced by Chinese, Canadian and European cultures. After she attended the 1979 International Oriental Music Festival in Durham, England, she was inspired to incorporate more Chinese music, poetry, and history into her works, and studied Chinese guqin music, medieval and classical poetry. Her compositions, such as the eleven-piece Voices in Time cycle, integrate her interdisciplinary interests and studies.
Tim Brady’s article on Hope Lee’s music, entitled “Eastern Traditions in Western Contexts” appeared in Musicworks 75 in 1999. Lee recently wrote an article for the German journal Positionen (Issue 63 ‘Migration’ May 2005) in which she described her musical synthesis of multiple cultural influences.
About the images: The post card at the top of the page was designed by Hope Lee and David Eagle as part of the Musicworks Anniversary series.
Lee completed music for a multimedia / dance piece entitled
“one thousand curves ten thousand colours” which was
premiered at the CanTai Festival in Taipei in 1999, and
reviewed by Allan Bell in MusicWorks 74 (refer to above
images of the choreography). The post card image is from the
same piece. The score example is from the 9th piece of
Lee’s 11-piece cycle, Four Winds from Heaven for women's
choir.
Hope Lee’s scores are published by Furore Verlag in Germany.
Visit: 
www.furore-verlag.de
