music/Maker with Tyler Kline: Building New Music from the Ground Up with Mendel Lee

On today's episode of music/Maker with Tyler Kline, Tyler is joined by composer Mendel Lee.

New Orleans-based composer, artistic entrepreneur, VCCA Fellow, and NPN Take Notice Fund grantee, Mendel Lee has built a creative practice that moves fluidly between writing music and building the infrastructure to support it. Since leaving his long tenure as Assistant Director of Tulane Bands in 2022, he has served as Executive Director of Versipel New Music – the organization born from a merger with his founding concert series nienteForte —–and as Board Vice President of Rhythm X.

Under his leadership, Versipel has become a defining force for new music in Louisiana, including launching Batture Contemporary, a Louisiana-focused new music festival. His music, praised for "finding the right balance between minimalist static space and forward motion and trajectory," draws on minimalist principles, groove-based rhythmic thinking, and a deep percussive background rooted in drum corps and the marching arts.

In this conversation, Mendel and Tyler trace a journey that is anything but linear: from new age piano pieces at high school talent shows, to drum corps, to a composition degree, to three years in corporate IT, to over a decade directing the Tulane marching band, to a leap of faith into full-time composing. They talk about the panic-written piece that finally made Mendel believe in his own musical instincts, the moment he stopped keeping his marching band identity separate from his concert work, what it really means to go from saying "I have a composition degree" to "I am a composer," and why his goal has never actually been for people to like his music.

Mendel and his music can be found online at https://mendellee.com/.

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music/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.

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