If you’re ever lucky enough to get in conversation with Cape Symphony Concertmaster and Managing Artistic Principal Jae Cosmos Lee, you might miss your next appointment, but you won’t care. When you meet a friendly, fun person who knows an awful lot about a great many things, and is always jazzed to learn more, time just doesn’t seem to matter.
Jae is that person. He’s very interesting, and very interested… in everything. Music, absolutely. Food, film, sports? Yes, yes, yes. Art, history, literature, language? Yes, please. All of it.
Jae was powerfully drawn to a life in classical music. Like some of Cape Symphony’s own Suzuki students, he started playing the violin at age 3. Never one for limits, he also went through an electronic music phase, “spinning records many nights on the Detroit scene” as a deejay while attending the University of Michigan. After graduation, he joined the Oakland East Bay Symphony as their youngest-ever principal violinist.
Chamber music became a lifelong passion, and Jae has lived all over the country working with string quartets. “Quartet work requires intense partnerships,” he says. “The mutual respect and understanding have to outlast time.” One such ensemble, with Jae as a founding member, gave rise to Boston’s unique, Grammy-nominated, self-conducted chamber orchestra A Far Cry.
Jae was with the Boston Philharmonic when he got a call some ten years ago about the Concertmaster position at Cape Symphony. We’ve been lucky to have him on board ever since! This year, he assumed an additional set of responsibilities as our Managing Artistic Principal. “I serve as a bridge between management, orchestra, and community, all from the musician’s side of things,” he explained. “’Principal’ signifies I am a principal player, not the conductor. In this role I’ll be a principal in both the orchestra and the organization.”
Asked how he manages the myriad responsibilities of his positions, Jae chuckles. “Let’s just say my life has had to be very structured.” What’s a day like in the life of our Concertmaster? “Well, I’m kind of a big coffee drinker, so that's first,” he says. Meetings and emails follow, then practice, practice, practice, and “each day I set aside an hour or so for bowings.” For the uninitiated (and with apologies to those in the know), this means going through the violin parts of a piece of music measure by measure and scribing the movements of the bows, so that the musicians know how to practice, and the piece comes together as a coherent, beautiful whole.
Asked what he likes to listen to in the car, Jae says “I’m a huge podcast listener... actually, I have a podcast.” Intrigued? Check it out! Jae’s Beethoven Bad Boy delivers “musings, conversations, comparisons, interviews and commentary about the current state of classical music and its inner workings through the lens of sports, food, comedy, films, history and media.”
Just cancel your next appointment. Who knows what you’ll learn!
