When Kangho Lee was growing up in Seoul, South Korea, his family moved into a high-rise apartment building. His mother heard someone in another apartment practicing the cello. She knocked on the door and asked who was giving lessons for the instrument.
“That’s how it all started,” recalls Lee, associate professor of music and coordinator of applied music in the School of Fine Arts, who performed a program of cello and piano music with pianist Minyoung Lee, an adjunct professor of music at UConn, on Dec. 1 at the Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts.
With his older sisters playing piano and violin, Lee often performed with his sisters and, as the winner of a Young Artists Competition, he made his orchestral debut with the Seoul Philharmonic at the age of 12. The following year he was invited by Heiichiro Ohyama, who was the Principal Violist of the LA Philharmonic, to come to the United States and he subsequently received his high school education in California.
Even as a high school student, Lee was very active as a performer. He worked under such renowned musicians as Andre Previn and Sir Simon Rattle, and gave solo and chamber music recitals in Los Angeles, Seoul, Boston and San Jose. As the assistant conductor of the Colburn School Orchestra, Lee gave concerts in Los Angeles and San Diego as well as in London and other cities in England. However, because his parents did not think music would provide a career for him, Lee went on to study economics at Swarthmore College, even as he continued to perform and pursue music studies during summer breaks as an artist-in-residence or as a student at music festivals in the United States and Canada.
After completing his degree in economics, Lee decided it was time to see if he could become a full-time musician. He was accepted to the master’s program at the Yale School of Music.
“My thought was to try and pursue music before I got any older because, unlike other studies, you have a time limit,” Lee says. “Your body doesn’t have much time to acquire the technical skills. I tell my students they should try to master the instrument by their mid-twenties. Those were my happiest days, because I was pursuing music full-time for the first time.”
Lee, who earned his doctorate in musical arts from the New England Conservatory, went on to perform with leading orchestras such as the Korean Broadcast System Symphony, the Euro-Asia Symphony, the Sofia National Academy Orchestra, and the Halle Philharmonic. He has performed as a soloist in Paris, Milan, and Rome, and was invited by the Moscow Conservatory to perform in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
In 2009 alone, Lee gave recitals in St. Louis, Boston, Knoxville, Newark and Seoul, and his performance of the Dvorak Cello Concerto with the Korean Symphony was televised nationally in Korea. As a chamber musician, Lee has collaborated with the principal players of the Philadelphia Orchestra, St. Louis Symphony and Seoul Philharmonic as well as faculty members of the Curtis Institute, Yale, Juilliard, and MIT. As a guest artist, he gave master classes at Boston University, the University of Tennessee and the University of Ulsan in Korea.
“I really do enjoy the liberal arts and the academic side of life and music as well,” Lee says. “My area of specialty is applied music performance. But what I’m proud of at UConn is that we not only provide a great education in the applied area but we have really first rate musicologists and theorists working together.”
Lee says he tries to use his liberal arts background as a teacher of music. He notes that one of his favorite “scholar-politicians” is Robert Reich, the former U.S Labor Secretary under President Clinton, who argues in his book The Work of Nations that the nation needs “people who can identify problems, solve problems, and facilitate these things.”
“Although the setting is different, my job as a teacher is to teach my students how to identify both music and physical-technical problems and approach them analytically so they are able to become lifelong learners – to continue to grow after they are done with their formal education,” Lee says.
He says one of the most enjoyable parts of his teaching in the School of Fine Arts is working with the Jorgensen Outreach for Youth program (JOY!), which invites low-income children and young adults to arts events in order to provide the opportunity to enrich, educate, and enhance their lives.
“I think that’s one of the great things about this University,” he says. “It presents the very top of the profession, but also is very conscious about reaching out to kids who may not have had a chance to experience anything like this. I am happy that we are able to work together with the community and have this cooperative outreach program.”
In his pedagogy class, Lee’s students get hands-on experience teaching and working with students in the JOY! program. “I think it’s something we ought to continue to do and promote,” he says.
Samples of Lee’s work from his CD Cinema Cello can be heard here: