Seoul-born Chicago based composer Dongryul Lee (이동렬, Korean pronunciation: [iː doŋ ɾjəɾ]) seeks to write music that is deeply oriented around the acoustical nature of sounds and virtuosic classical performance practice, creating profound aural experiences with both dramaturgy and pathos. He finds inspirations in spiritual, literary, and scientific elements, encompassing a diverse range of topics from Borgesian poetics to Number Theory. Of Lee’s A finite island in the infinite ocean, Robert Hasegawa (editor of The Oxford Handbook of Orchestration Studies) writes, “Lee is exploring a complex net of tunings that foreground unfamiliar kinds of consonances between notes of the solo violin. [...] but Lee raises the ante by allowing considerably more complex sonic relationships to emerge. The result is a piece which sounds entirely fresh yet somehow natural in its unfolding.”
His compositions have been performed by ensembles such as the Avanti!, Grossman, Kairos, Contemporanea, Jupiter, MIVOS, Callithumpian Consort, GMCL, S.E.M., Conference Ensemble, Paramirabo, and Illinois Modern Ensemble. Lee was awarded the Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship in 2020; the third prize in the first Bartók World Competition (Hungary, 2018); the Special Prize Piero Pezzé in the Composition Competition Città di Udine (Italy, 2018); Second Prize in the 3rd GMCL Competition (Portugal, 2017); and Second Prize in the 2017 Busan Maru International Composition Competition (South Korea). His dissertation research on virtual bells realized by using the Finite Element Method was presented at the IRCAM Forum Workshop in Montreal in February 2021. The performance of his Unending Rose by the Kairos Quartett (Berlin, 2020) was supported by the Presser Foundation Award, Arts Council Korea, Kultur Büro Elisabeth Berlin, and Ministry of Culture of the Land Brandenburg. His Parastrata has been performed in four different cities in Europe and North America, and his A finite island in the infinite ocean was premiered at the Fromm Players Concerts at Harvard by Miranda Cuckson in April 2021. His new pieces are commissioned by Grossman Ensemble (Chicago) and the Callithumpian Consort (Boston) to be premiered in 2021-2022.
Lee was the 2020-21 Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Chicago’s Center for Contemporary Composition. He began music-making when he was 14 after spending countless hours transcribing all kinds of music with computer, and was largely self-taught thereafter until his twenties by analyzing Bach, attending university music courses, and practicing piano as a late beginner. Dongryul finally came to the US in 2008 to study at the Eastman School (BM in composition) as a 29 years old freshman, after earning a degree in computer science (BS) from Yonsei University and studying music privately while working as a SW engineer. He completed his MM and DMA degrees in composition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he taught classes and administered the McFarland Carillon. His primary composition teachers include Reynold Tharp, Jukka Tiensuu, Heinrich Taube, Stephen Taylor, Erin Gee, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, David Liptak, and Tae-hoon Kim. He also studied conducting with Brad Lubman and Mark Davis Scatterday, and piano with Tony Caramia and Yoon Jeong Kim.
Dongryul Lee's Unsmeared, like a bodiless horn premiered with the Grossman Ensemble on March 12, 2021.
Program notes:
Music is about relations. Time is expressed (or only can be perceived) by the relations between the preceding entities and the following entities, with things being changed either abruptly or gradually; or can be the same, either sustaining or repeating; or being created and dying away. Sound is also created by relations. It first comes to be born by the relation between waves and time (frequency), and then every sound in musical space is interconnected, either harmonically — in the same temporal space, melodically — in the continuous temporal space, or psychologically — in the formal musical space. This can give rise to new impressions when it encounters (becomes related with) the memory and emotion of the listeners. PROGRAM NOTES & BIOGRAPHIES Grossman Ensemble March 2021 | 5 The idea of relationship is the crux in Buddhist philosophy, where the world is created because of the chain of relations (연기-緣起, Prati¯tyasamutpa¯da, often translated as conditioned arising/dependent arising). In this piece, rather than delineating a clear topic/theme through its musical body, I set out to depict a self-fulfilled musical circuit (mundus) that is created by infinite relations, by using “a priori synthesis by which something will necessarily be produced in a given mode […] and an infinite analysis by which what is produced on the BwO [body without organs] (music) is already part of that body (music)’s production, is already included in the body (music), is already on it (but at the price of an infinity of passages, divisions, and secondary productions)” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Pleateus, 154.) The goal is for listeners to perceive aurally the way the creator (I) senses the (actual) world, represented metaphysically through acoustical-physical entities. According to the Diamond Sutra (금강반야바라밀경-金剛般若波羅蜜經), there is no thing that truly exists. Everything is temporary and always changing according to their interrelationships with others, which are also false beings. The one existential truth arises only after removing all of those nets of relations. In this piece, through dynamic movements of musical masses and their relations, I wanted to express this Buddhist conception of the truth, the existential light (무량광불-無量光佛, Amita¯bha) before all chains of relations, which only exists beyond the means of expressions (진여실상-眞如實相, Great Symbol, Maha¯mudra¯), by annihilating everything before it (멸진정-滅盡定, Nirodha-sama¯patti) or knowing that everything is just momentarytemporary (제법개공-諸法皆空, Su¯nyata¯). In this sense, this miniature can be regarded as a short Buddhist question (화두-話頭, 公案-Ko¯an (Japanese), Zen question.) The title is from the text in the Sutta Nipa¯ta, one of the earliest Buddhist scriptures:
Unstartled, like a lion at sounds.
Unsnared, like the wind in a net.
Unsmeared, like a lotus in water.
wander alone like a rhinoceros horn.