(Born 1975 in St. Joseph, Michigan)
Admired for his “bright, pure music” (The Washington Post), with compositions described as “atmospheric and endlessly inventive” (Cincinnati Business Courier), James Lee III, an American composer, has composed more than 80 works for orchestra, chamber ensemble, piano, voice, and choral ensemble. His works have been performed by major orchestras and solo performers across the United States, Europe, and Latin America. His work appears on Anthony McGill and the Pacifica Quartet’s GRAMMY Award-nominated American Stories.
Raised in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, Lee has taken inspiration from his close study of Biblical texts and from history. He began his musical studies as a piano student and earned a B.A. in piano performance from the University of Michigan, as well as a master’s and Ph.D. in composition. He studied composition with Michael Daugherty, William Bolcom, Bright Sheng, and others. His career began in 2006 when Leonard Slatkin and the National Symphony Orchestra premiered his dissertation work Beyond Rivers of Vision (2005) at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
Lee currently is a professor of theory and composition at Morgan State University. In the 2024-2025 season, he served as Composer-in-Residence with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Honors awarded to Lee include a Charles Ives Scholarship and the Wladimir Lakond Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
During the 2025-2026 season, Lee will have seven world premieres after an initial August 2025 premiere of his new work Connected Perceptions, commissioned by the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center and conductor Jonathon Heyward. His works will also be performed this season by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, National Danish Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra, Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, and Pensacola Symphony Orchestra.
The 2024-2025 season featured the inaugural performance of Lee’s Clarinet Concerto by Anthony McGill and the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra. Other highlights of the season included a performance of Lee’s work Ad Adah? by Emanuel Ax and Anthony McGill, first at Irvine Barclay Theatre in California and later at Carnegie Hall. Lee also served as a composition fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center in the summer of 2002. In the course of his composing career, Lee’s orchestral works have been commissioned and premiered by the National Symphony Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, New World Symphony Orchestra, and the orchestras of Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Omaha, Pasadena, Memphis, Grand Rapids, Cincinnati, Atlanta, and Akron.
As winner of the Sphinx Commissioning Consortium in 2011-2012, Lee composed one of his best-known works, Sukkot Through Orion’s Nebula, which the New World Symphony Orchestra, led by Michael Tilson Thomas, premiered. In 2014, he was a Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Professor at the State University of Campinas in Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil, where he composed, taught composition, and researched the music of 20th and 21st century Brazilian composers. Lee also previously served as composer-in-residence for the Ritz Chamber Players, an African-American chamber music society, based in Jacksonville, Florida. He was selected for two key commissions from the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra: Chuphshah! Harriet’s Drive to Canaan, a work inspired by the life of Harriet Tubman, and Thurgood’s Rhapsody, commissioned for the orchestra’s centennial season in 2015-2016.
The composer wrote the following note about the 2018 Quintet for Clarinet and String Quartet:
“Quintet for Clarinet and String Quartet is a four-movement work inspired by historical aspects of indigenous Americas. The first movement, Forgotten Emblems uses what I call an ‘inverted shofar theme’ that can be heard at the beginning of Nathaniel Dett’s ‘The Ordering of Moses’ and William Dawson’s ‘Negro Folk Symphony.’ This movement also refers to various paintings of ‘An Emblem of America’ from the eighteenth century. There are also many moments when I try to imitate an Indian Pow Wow. I named the second movement Awashoha, which is a Choctaw Indian word that means to ‘play somewhere.’ This serves as the scherzo movement. Movement three, Alas, my identity. . . serves as a kind of lament and references the reclassification of many indigenous people and the removal to other regions of the country. Then finally, movement four is a short dance celebration of the lives represented in the various paintings of ‘An Emblem of America.’”