Da Capo Conversations 2.0 with Valerie Liu and Devon Lee

For Good Measure, by Ensemble for These Times (E4TT)
Episode 197: Da Capo Conversations 2.0 with Valerie Liu and Devon Lee

Looking for a way to listen to diverse creators and to support equity in the arts? Tune in weekly to For Good Measure!

Today we revisit Valerie Liu’s and Devon Lee’s perspectives on who or what inspires them. If you enjoyed today’s conversation and want to know more about Valerie Liu and Devon Lee, check them out here and here. Parts of this episode originally premiered in April 2022, click here, and March 2025, click here.

This podcast is made possible by grants from the California Arts Council, SF Arts Commission, Grants for the Arts, and generous donors like you. Want to support For Good Measure and E4TT? Make a tax-deductible donation or sign up for our newsletter, and subscribe to the podcast!

Intro music: “Trifolium” by Gabriela Ortiz, performed by E4TT (Ilana Blumberg, violin; Abigail Monroe, cello; Margaret Halbig, piano), as part of “Below the Surface: Music by Women Composers,” January 29, 2022
Outro music: “Lake Turkana” by Marcus Norris, performed by E4TT (Margaret Halbig, piano), as part of “Alchemy,” October 15, 2021

Transcription courtesy of Otter.ai.
Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1903729/episodes/18679327

Co-Producer, Host, and E4TT co-founder: Nanette McGuinness
Co-Producer and Audio Engineer: Stephanie M. Neumann
Podcast Cover Art: Brennan Stokes
Interns: Renata Volchinskaya, Sam Mason, Christy Xu

Transcript

Nanette McGuinness  00:00

[INTRO MUSIC] Welcome to For Good Measure, an interview series celebrating diverse composers and other creative artists. I'm Nanette McGuinness, Artistic Executive Director of Ensemble for These Times. In this week's episode, we continue our Da Capo Conversations, a mini-series where we'll be giving familiar segments a topical twist. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS] Today, we revisit Valerie Liu's and Devon Lee's perspectives on who or what inspires them. Here's what Valerie Liu had to say.

Valerie Liu  00:39

Leaving nursing, um, familiar territory, and entering a new territory is actually very scary for me, you know. It's a bit uncomfortable at times, pursuing something new and something so different. It is, It is very exciting, however., When I decided to change my career, I did feel a strong calling into the music field. At the same time, something else happened in my personal life sort of gave a further push. My dad just passed away. It was a dark time for me. I didn't have a good relationship with my father. I was hoping to improve the situation sometime in my lifetime, but it was too late. He passed away before I had a chance to do that. I wish I have done more, put more effort, and sooner than later. My, my father had a tough life, but he loved his job. He was a writer, a journalist. He lights up every time he talks about his work. I want to be like that. You know doing something you love, music is what I love. And I think my father is guiding me somehow, as a mentor, looking and remembering the way he immersed so deeply in his work, gave me the courage to head towards a new direction. There are two other mentors also play an important part doing my transition. One mentor is my church pastor, Jordan. He is very supportive of my career change. Whenever I have any trace of doubt, I would just go to him. He would always reassure me, pray for me, talk it out with me if needed. Another mentor is pastor Keith Battle. I follow him online and listen to his talk a lot. He did a talk on Journey To Your Dreams, and I find it very inspiring. He said to make your dreams a reality, you need to go through a process. Train your character, learn to be patient, learn to wait, learn to handle bad situations as they come, learn how to be abandoned when no one supports your dream. He said that your challenge can take you to places, but your character needs to sustain you there, so that you have the maturity to handle your calling. I was very inspired by his speech. As much as I would like to go straight into the music field, but having taken that stop at the medical field, I think it prepares me better, because I get to witness illnesses, struggles, depression, death, warmth, courage, teamwork, it helps me understand human emotions in a deeper level, and I can express that with my music. He also said that while you wait, it's a good time to work on your gift, get prepared. Also not formally, but privately, I was always performing or working with someone in the music field. So when I do study it formally, I noticed I was making faster progress. Um, the musical mentor, I would say it is Dr Cecile. I was taking undergrad music theory class, and he was the one who first noticed that I write pretty good stuff. So he would ask me: "Can you share that with the class?" I am not sure, I was thinking, is just an exercise it can't be that good. And I never thought, I want to study music. I was definitely thinking, piano, okay, piano, piano, music education. composer? I'm scared of it. I mean, that sounds so great, but it just sounds so hard. So he's the one that kind of, you know, pushed me a little. He said, you know, share your piece. Find someone to play your piece, let us hear it. So I think because of his encouragement. So it definitely, you know, sort of, there's this... like, maybe you should head towards composition instead of just music in general. Like, music, yeah, education, or, you know, piano.

Nanette McGuinness  06:00

Here's what Devon Lee had to say.

Devon Lee  06:03

I'll start with kind of talking about being in between of two worlds, I guess. I feel like I know a lot of children of immigrants, or even immigrants, especially Korean people that I've talked to, who feel kind of bad because they don't have such a strong connection to their culture or like where they came from. For me, it's very direct. It's like I grew up there. But for some people, it's like, way more distant. But then for me, it's, I also have friends who are, you know, they speak Korean so much more fluently. They are up with the times, they've lived there for a lot longer. I honestly don't, I don't really think that, I think that to a Korean, I'm just so aggressively American, an American, I think I'm just like a little bit Korean, you know. On one hand, it's been just amazing to be able to like experience both cultures. And I really love that. I feel like I'm in a really great place with that. But it also really does feel like I'm not, I don't really have strong ties to either. So it's been, for me personally, this more applies to me personally and less musically, um, just like, where do I fit? When it comes to like, where am I going to go, you know, how do I feel about my my family? You know, are we from the same country? Are they like foreigners to me now? Kind of stuff like that. And musically, I'm kind of coming back to the sounds from more of my childhood with a lot of vigor lately. I really avoided it for a long time. Well, first because, you know, it's kind of weird to isolate music from certain cultures, and sometimes I fear that it might be like, Oh, it might be too gimmicky. I really don't want to make it seem like, oh, look at me, I'm from a culture. But, um, I also don't want, by trying not to alienate it, I'm, I was kind of purposefully, like, keeping it away. And, I don't know, I, I've been really having a lot of fun lately, trying to explore where the music from my past and the images from my past, like, I can, I can use the images from my presence to bring that together. I've been listening to a lot of, like, not really, I want to really get into more Korean traditional music, pansori, like, traditional music, but also just kind of like fun, but like, kind of like 80s, it's kind of like, trot music. It's very much like, oh, we're having fun. And I've been incorporating that into stuff that I've been working on, but very, very slowly. It's still been tough to figure out where it lies.

Nanette McGuinness  09:08

So I had a couple of questions for you. One is an observation that it sounds like you're kind of twixt  and between, that, you're struggling with the notion of assimilation versus embracing versus rejecting, and what to kind of include in the larger definition of what makes you you. And you actually, I think will really enjoy our next two seasons, because we have a two-year, yeah, yeah. Wait. We have a two-year commissioning initiative that we're calling "Women Crossing Liminality," and it's about in the first year, the commission's project is "Women in Transit," and it's about the effect of immigration and identity on women. 

Devon Lee  09:52

Well, that's beautiful.

Nanette McGuinness  09:54

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. So it's exactly what, what you're talking about, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I'd like you to circle back and talk a little bit about, and I'm not sure if I'm going to get this word right, pansori, the traditional Korean.

Devon Lee  10:08

Yeah, well, God, I, it's something that I have such a strong like I have so so many strong emotions towards. I love it very much. But I want to admit right away, I am the farthest thing from an expert that could ever exist. I, I'm just enjoying it from the outside. I, there's so much that, there's so much intricacy, and like the history, the performance, the repertoire, that I have no idea. I just, I think my entire exposure to it was as a kid sometimes hearing it, you know, at school, when you were learning about culture, doing like a festival or something. And but mostly for the past couple of years, finding it on YouTube and just...

Nanette McGuinness  10:53

Oh yeah, yeah.

Devon Lee  10:54

...enjoying it, hearing it. I think something that I find so interesting about it is that my, I just feel so drawn to it in a way that feels mostly subconscious, because I so, I know so much, I feel little about it, but I still get, I feel so stirred whenever I hear it. I get excited, I get interested. It speaks to you. Yeah, and I'm coming at it mostly from the perspective of an outsider. And while I feel like in the past I might have made me feel kind of guilty about how much I know about my own culture. But now it just makes me excited. It's like it makes me actually really excited to know that if I can look into this, then people all around the world can learn about this too. Yeah, it's just something that I know just a little about, but I'd really love to learn more about.

Nanette McGuinness  11:49

I understand. So you aren't comfortable giving us a textbook definition of it. It's more that you're you're drawn to it, that you...

Devon Lee  11:58

Oh, I could give you,

Nanette McGuinness  12:00

Um please.

Devon Lee  12:00

I could give you some definitions that I've gathered, but with like, an infinite number of little asters, yes, exactly. Pansori, I think the romanization of it is P, A, N, S, O, R, I. Sori in Korean means sound, and Pansori is a kind of traditional Korean music. It's kind of like a genre that's kind of theatrical, it involves very, like, steady percussion and a singer. I mostly heard just one singer performing a story, and the style is just like, really fascinating and enrapturing. But what's what's cool is that there's always like, different embellishments that remind me of, like Baroque music.

Nanette McGuinness  12:51

Yeah.

Devon Lee  12:52

Where the, the singer might use, like word painting or little embellishments to decorate the words. And it's just something that really interests me.

Nanette McGuinness  13:03

That sounds fascinating. Thank you, very interesting. So you're drawn to that, you're drawn to 80s, I guess I would say kind of sort of dance music as well.

Devon Lee  13:14

Yeah, in Korea. And I also wanted to talk a little bit about another place where I feel kind of like navigated being in between the world of more music performance and then composition. Also, like a more, I guess, a more traditional path and then a more personal explorative path. One of my most influential mentors was Jon Deak, who I mentioned. He used to be the Assistant Principal Bassist of the New York Phil. But during that time, and long after, he was also he had, like, a flourishing career as a composer, and then he went on to create and found the very own composers program, which was where I first started composing. So he's someone who, throughout his career, has just made it to one of the, you know, the world's most prestigious orchestras, and had a career in that and been just like an exceptional performer. And also he has a big, sort of, a lot of interesting music for bass and different ensembles, and just the fact that he somehow did it both, making new things and also playing older things, just really inspired me from the get go, and it's still been inspiring me. But it's been really weird, kind of trying to navigate those two areas at once. Yeah, you think that it would be pretty similar. It's like, oh, you play music, I write music. Well, we that overlaps hugely. But for me, at least, it felt just difficult to figure out how to utilize my time best. I don't want to sacrifice one for the other, like that's going to be a big challenge for me going forward.

Nanette McGuinness  15:03

yeah, there's the kinesthetic skill set of being good at an instrument. Right? Versus the intellectual auditory skillset of writing music. They do overlap, but they're super different. And to become good at an instrument, one often ends up grinding away hours and hours and hours, which those hours don't feel like hours because one loves one's instrument. You know what I'm saying? The time melts away and you're like, oh my god, did I just spend five hours playing around, you know? Or whatever. Sometimes it can be a grind, but there is that love, but they are different, and they use time differently, so it makes perfect sense. So you're experiencing that struggle right now and aren't yet sure which love may pull you more on any given day.

Devon Lee  15:56

Yeah, yeah. I've really been trying to nurture both as best I can, but yeah, definitely been dealing with like, worry that I might be lacking in your field, but I just kind of try to stay focused on my main value, which is just like making, making music and enjoying myself and working with people that I love, and I feel like I can do that with, within both areas, and I can do my best.

Nanette McGuinness  16:23

[OUTRO MUSIC] Thank you for listening to For Good Measure's Da Capo Conversations, and a special thank you to our guests for joining us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to our podcast by clicking on the subscribe button and support us by sharing it with your friends, posting about it on social media and leaving us a rating and a review. To learn more about E4TT, our concert season online and in the Bay Area, or to make a tax-deductible donation, please visit us at www.E4TT.org. This podcast is made possible by grants from the California Arts Council, the San Francisco Arts Commission, Grants for the Arts, and generous donors like you. For Good Measure is produced by Nanette McGuinness and Ensemble for These Times, and design by Brennan Stokes, with special thanks to Co-producer and Audio Engineer Stephanie M. Neumann. Remember to keep supporting equity in the arts and tune in next week "for good measure." [OUTRO MUSIC ENDS]