Conversation: Deborah Lee
Interview by Jiaqi Kang
This interview was originally published in Issue #3 “LIGHT (阴)”. Read it now on BLURB.
Like many Chinese children, I played the piano growing up. Around six years in, I switched from private lessons to taking classes at the conservatory, and began studying under Deborah Lee. For the next four years, her endless patience and consideration turned me from an awful pianist to an average one. After I quit piano, we have occasionally met up to drink bubble tea and talk about deep stuff.
Born in Oakland, California to a mother from Hong Kong and a father from Taiwan, Lee grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. where the diverse environment prophesied her current cosmopolitan lifestyle. A graduate of the Peabody Institute, The Juilliard School, and the Conservatoire de Musique de Genève, Lee is an accomplished musician who has performed around the world. Her schedule for next year includes a tour around Asia that features both solo performances and a program with a clarinetist.
Within the stark black-and-white keys of a piano, there seems to lie an opalescent truth that shines differently every time a piece is played. Under a moon thin and translucent like a sticky slice of watermelon, I promised to myself that I would continue to practice Clair de Lune, one of the last pieces that Lee taught me. It would be the one piece I keep forever — a muscle memory memento. Yet promises, like pie crusts, are made to be broken.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Jiaqi Kang: When did you first realise you wanted to do music?
Deborah Lee: That’s a really difficult question! Already, at an early age, I was motivated to explore and to learn, even on my own. And then later on, maybe around the age of 13, my parents started sending me to music camps in the summer that would last six to nine weeks. I met slightly older kids, teenagers, who were equally or more motivated and had more knowledge than I did. And that was really interesting for me. I got to interact with faculty there. Everybody was living on campus. It was really interesting to see how professional musicians interact and work, basically, all day long, on perfecting their art. I think it must’ve been sometime over the course of these summer camps that I decided that I would like to also become a professional
musician. But I mean, up until the age of 15 or 16, I always toyed with the idea of doing other stuff: studying medicine, or architecture. So up until graduation from high school I continued taking honors classes and AP classes and [studying very hard.]
JK: What led you to coming to Geneva?
DL: Well you know, life is full of strange twists and turns. At age 17, because of my experience in the music camp where I met a lot of foreign students, I had this dream of coming to Paris and studying in the CNSM in Paris, which is one of the best music schools in the world. Of course my parents said no. And this is also probably why I didn’t go to Yale. Instead I went to Peabody, which is a 45-minute drive [away]. I think my parents were not keen on me going far away. After grad school, I think this idea somehow came back into my head that I really wanted to go to Europe, because Europe is the birthplace of classical music. You want to get to the source and try to be more influenced by the authenticity of Europe; to try to experience the culture from where this art came. It’s kind of a logical step for many students of classical music, including myself. But… after grad school I just tried to make a living in New York City, which is incredibly difficult as a freelance artist [in] any kind of domain, be it music, or dramatic arts, or dance. It’s just tough for everybody because there’s so much competition and so little space. So I was freelancing and I got sick of it. And I thought, “Let me go back to school for a little bit.” Because I missed performing, I had somehow entered myself into an international piano competition, which is in Switzerland. The Clara Haskil Competition. Somehow, without really preparing, I ended up in the final. So I thought, “Well, if I went back to school and studied, seriously, if I would have the time to practice, maybe I could actually win one of these things.” The sort of thing that every piano student dreams of doing and is supposedly a way of launching your career. But that’s actually a myth. So I followed that myth for a little bit. I ended up moving to Geneva because I met a very good teacher based at the Conservatoire.
JK: How do you think your Chinese background has influenced your career?
DL: Career? I’m not sure. My music-making or my approach to my work? I think it’s probably given me a lot of discipline and perseverance. My parents (obviously) insisted that I work hard all the time and they set a good example for me as well. I think in a very traditional Asian culture there’s often this sense of humility and unwillingness to boast about oneself, and this might actually be a disadvantage for me as my career goes, because in a modern career, there’s so much competition and everything is on the Internet. Everybody has to sell themselves. And you can’t be bashful about it. You really have to put yourself out there. And when you meet people, you can’t be self-effacing, you have to always put your best foot forward, always smile. And
that’s been a bit difficult for me. Learning how to deal with that.
“Everybody has to sell themselves. And you can’t be bashful about it. You really have to put yourself out there.”
JK: What are some other obstacles you’ve encountered, in general?
DL: Actually, to go along with this… I don’t wanna say problem, but this challenge of overcoming your intrinsic humility and trying to market yourself, there comes along with it also… From a very early age, for better or for worse, I was taught to strive for perfection, and I don’t know if this is necessarily only coming from my Asian culture but it’s really ingrained into the teaching of classical music, as you will probably know. I tried to instill a little bit of that upon you. So this must’ve come from teachers as well, and classmates. And the problem is perfection is impossible. But if you always use this goal as a means of motivating yourself, then sometimes when it’s time to perform, and you haven’t arrived at perfection, sometimes it can really block you from performing, or at least doing your best. And for some people it can even impede your overall performance.
“The problem is perfection is impossible.”
JK: As for me, I kind of reach my peak but I don’t realise it’s my peak, and I keep practicing, and it actually goes down for me. Does that ever happen to you?
DL: Really? That happened to you in piano? You never told me that when you were studying with me! Actually, no, that doesn’t usually happen to me. But it could be a different phenomenon. Maybe after achieving a certain level, you don’t know what else to work on and so you start focusing on less important things and they distract you. That’s a possibility.
JK: That makes sense.
DL: Yeah.
JK: So how do you juggle teaching and performing?
DL: It’s difficult. For the time being, I’ve chosen to mostly concentrate on my teaching into 3 days and thereby theoretically giving myself 4 days to work on performance. But it never works out that way. It’s physically demanding to do both, and to want to do both, at a high level. But actually over the years, I’ve realised that by teaching, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve been able to generalise a lot of information and been able to come to conclusions about my own playing as well. And I’ve been able to apply a lot of things that I must have known prior to teaching — but once I actually tell my students to do a certain thing, then I feel obliged to follow myself. So in fact my efficiency in practicing has really accelerated to the point where sometimes it’s not a good thing because I actually should spend more time just training my muscles. It’s important. But because of being able to think through things very quickly, because of teaching, I end up practicing less.
“By teaching, I’ve learned a lot.”
JK: Clair de Lune is part of the Debussy’s Suite bergamasque, initially composed in 1890 and significantly revised before its publication in 1905. Its name comes from a poem by Paul Verlaine of the same title:
“Votre âme est un paysage choisi
Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques
Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi
Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques.
Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur
L’amour vainqueur et la vie opportune
Ils n’ont pas l’air de croire à leur bonheur
Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune,
Au calme clair de lune triste et beau,
Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres
Et sangloter d’extase les jets d’eau,
Les grands jets d’eau sveltes parmi les marbres.”
It’s a decasyllable poem by a Symbolist author; Clair de Lune is said to be part of the Impressionist movement in music. Both of these artists attempted to convey moods and feelings, or “colors” through the use of motifs in their respective arts. It’s interesting because when you taught me, you often told me to “change colors”; that each different section carries a different mood. It’s very synesthetic. I always just thought about what color I wanted and it kind of came out. But how do you think it actually works, musically?
DL: Well, we have a lot of parameters, so obviously one is dynamics, volume. Another one is touch. And already with those 2 parameters you can create a lot of different colors. But you can add something else… we also have the pedal to work with. We have not only the sostenuto pedal that sustains the notes. We have also the una corda pedal which mutes the sound, so there are two more parameters. And there’s also timing. Once the human ear is accustomed to a certain rhythm, if you change it suddenly, then that produces also an emotional effect.
JK: How do you go about teaching a piece, especially this piece? For example, Bach, I think teachers use it to teach us technique, right?
DL: I actually use Bach not so much for teaching technique but for teaching
listening. I think I try to use all music to teach listening. As far as teaching the same piece to different people, I don’t have a rule because I think my basic approach to teaching is just to react to the student, so I always see whatever problem they present to me and I work on that.
JK: Clair de Lune was originally called “Promenade sentimentale”, then was changed to fit the reference to Verlaine. How does this change in title affect the piece’s interpretation?
DL: That’s interesting because I actually did not know that piece of information before you told me. But I guess yes, if you see a piece entitled “Promenade sentimentale”, you might feel entitled to take more liberty with it, especially with tempo. And the title Clair de Lune is actually more ambiguous and allows you to do many more subtle things. It doesn’t pigeonhole the piece to a certain category. However, I would be very careful about interpreting pieces solely based on titles, because a lot of times the titles
only get tagged on after the pieces have already been composed, and I suppose, with or without title, I would react based on the musical construction and so my interpretative decisions would be based much more on my musical analysis and instincts.
JK: What do you think of the impact of the piece? It’s very famous.
DL: I wonder why it’s so famous… it’s very melodious, it’s very pleasing to the ear and — probably Débussy would not have liked to hear this — but it’s very easy listening, in a way. Especially compared to the other pieces in the suite, which are a bit more abstract, and based on baroque dances.
JK: Why would he put this piece with the other more abstract ones in the same suite?
DL: It makes for a nice contrast. As a suite is called the Suite bergamasque, and this is already evoked in the poem. I suppose it could be Débussy’s way of integrating this late 19th-century, early 20th century aesthetic into the cadre of this suite. At the end of the 19th century, French composers were a bit in a quandary, and they were trying to get out from under the influence of the German Romantic school. So one way they did that was to look back and try
to get influenced by, try to find inspiration from French composers of the baroque period. And then another way they did that was to follow the trend of French harmony at the end of the 19th century. So I suppose this is the latter. He’s following the latter trend.
Θ
Original interview by Jiaqi. Medium article edited and uploaded by Jessica Ho.
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