Composer James Lee III celebrates the legacy of Harriet Tubman

James Lee III is riding something of a career high.

He is beginning a one-year appointment as composer-in-residence at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and unveiling a clarinet concerto in November. In addition, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra will present its first-ever performances of Chuphshah! Harriet’s Drive to Canaan as part of a set of concerts Oct. 10 and 11. (It will be the second work of his that the CSO has presented, following a set of 2019 performances of his Sukkot Through Orion’s Nebula.)

Marin Alsop, who will serve as guest conductor for the concerts, was music director of the Baltimore Symphony when it commissioned and premiered Chuphshah! in 2011. She has been a champion of Lee’s music, recording of an album of his orchestral works with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra that was released in 2022 on the Avie label.

The Baltimore Symphony requested that Lee compose a musical portrait of Harriet Tubman, a famed abolitionist, activist and former slave who helped some 70 slaves escape to the North along the Underground Railroad. Chuphshah is an ancient Hebrew word for freedom, especially freedom from slavery. “I patterned it like that,” Lee said, “because, of course, Harriet Tubman was considered to be Moses, the liberator at the time.” The rest of the title echoes those of African-American spirituals, with their religious references and disguised references to slavery and liberation.

According to Lee, the 13-minute piece’s opening immediately plunges the listener into a chase scene, evoking the sense of slaves on the run to freedom. Chuphshah! incorporates quotes from the “Battle Hymn of the Republic;” “Dixie” or “Dixie’s Land,” an 1859 song that became the de facto national anthem of the Confederacy; “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” an African American spiritual, and “No More Auction Block for Me,” which was included in the 1867 anthology, Slave Songs of the United States. “Those melodies appear and are transformed at some points or they are clothed in certain dissonant harmonies, as if you are these alternate worlds,” Lee said. “The work is quite rhythmic, too.”

Lee, 48, was born in St. Joseph, Michigan, and grew up in nearby Benton Harbor. He started taking piano lessons at age 12 and took up composing a few years later. In his last year of high school, he wrote a piano concerto for an honors project. Because Chicago was the closest major city, he and his parents occasionally attended CSO concerts. “I would just love to go hear them perform as a teenager,” he said. “It was almost like the local orchestra, being 1½ hours away.”

He didn’t take composition seriously, though, until he was in the midst of pursuing an undergraduate degree in piano performance at the University of Michigan, and Grammy Award-nominated composer Gabriela Lena Frank, then a doctoral student at the school and a friend, encouraged him to apply for the graduate composition program. He went on to earn his master’s and doctoral degrees there, writing a 2005-06 work titled Beyond Rivers of Vision as his dissertation.

In February 2006, Lee attended a concert of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., where Leonard Slatkin was music director at the time, and decided to reach out to the conductor about perhaps performing at least an excerpt from the work. Lee had met Slatkin a year or so earlier when the conductor, well known for his interest in new music, took part in a seminar for composition students while at the University of Michigan to conduct William Bolcolm’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Lee asked Bolcolm, who was on the school’s composition faculty from 1973 through 2008 and who was a friend of Slatkin, if he would help facilitate a meeting, and the elder composer did just that.

Later in February, Lee was invited to Slatkin’s office at the Kennedy Center, where he presented Slatkin with a copy of the score. The conductor in turn invited him to attend a performance of a new work by Joseph Schwantner two days later. After that concert, the two were chatting, and Slatkin informed him that the National Symphony was including Beyond Rivers of Vision as part of its 2006-07 season. And sure enough, it was listed on the schedule a short time later when the orchestra’s season was announced, providing a huge kickstart to the young composer’s career.

Especially early in his career, some of Lee’s compositions drew on his religious beliefs as a Seventh Day Adventist and explored biblical imagery especially from the Books of Daniel and Revelations. As a compositional student, he was struck by how Olivier Messiaen’s Roman Catholic faith suffused many of the French composer’s works like his 1975-79 opera, St. Francis of Assisi. “I don’t necessarily proselytize,” Lee said, “but it’s an aspect of me and my upbringing. Some of the imagery is so interesting, and it is something that I was very drawn to, especially writing for the orchestra. It’s something that suited itself very well to portray those images.”

That Lee is serving this season as composer-in-residence at the Baltimore Symphony is hardly happenstance. He lives just outside the city and serves as a professor of theory and composition at Morgan State University in Baltimore, so the ensemble is essentially his home orchestra. “I’m very much looking forward to that,” he said of the post. “I have been composing works for them over the years, and it’s nice to have a little more expanded relationship with them.”

On Nov. 2, the Kalamazoo (Mich.) Symphony Orchestra will present the world premiere of Lee’s Clarinet Concerto with Anthony McGill, principal clarinet of the New York Philharmonic, as soloist. “I’ve always wanted to write a concerto for him,” Lee said, “He played a work of mine two seasons ago, and we were looking for other ways to collaborate So, I was happy that this could work out.” The debut is part of the Kalamazoo orchestra’s Living Voices initiative, which has featured commissions from Valerie Coleman and Anna Clyne in past seasons. 

Lee is in the midst of a heavy phase of concerto writing. In addition to the Clarinet Concerto, the Baltimore Symphony is set to premiere his Cello Concerto in May 2025 with soloist Joshua Roman and his Concerto for Orchestra the following month. In addition, he is working on an homage to George Gershwin to mark the 100th anniversary in 2025 of the composer’s famed Concerto in F. Lee’s tribute piece, titled Concerto in A, will be debuted in the fall of 2025 by pianist Jeffrey Biegel and a yet-to-be-announced orchestra.