newsletter – MENDEL LEE

A Midway Check-in – Mendel’s Newsletter #6 (Apr 26)

Mendel Lee — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 15:04:32 +0000

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A Midway Check-in

Mendel’s Newsletter #6 (April 2026)

Mardi Gras 2026 has come and gone, and that means that we’re now in the phase of the year where new music in New Orleans is usually the most packed. Add on top of that my own personal projects, and I’m going to be pretty non-stop from now until June, and particularly in the next six weeks.

Because of this, I’m pleased to make the following announcement:

?? You’re getting bonus content for two months! ??

Given all of the exciting stuff happening in such a short-time period, expect one or two “sprint” newsletters over the next couple of months – quick social-media-style digests where I can bring you along on my spring journey of events as they happen.

As a preview/tease for what’s coming:

Reflecting on almost four years as a freelancer

In a recent digital exchange with one of my relatives, I was asked the question, “Four years in, does going freelance look like you thought it would?” My impulse answer boiled down to ?.

At the time when I quit my full-time job at Tulane in 2022, my goals were broad and open-ended:

Write more music
Get more of my music played
Scale nienteForte’s operations bigger

While I probably had some concrete benchmarks at a conscious and subconscious level, I didn’t put a lot of energy into milestones or deliverables. Never did I seriously answer questions like, “where do I want to be in five years?” or try to set hardline goals like, “I want to make $x annually as a freelancer by 2026.”

Upon reflection, I think this is a product of the circuitous and wildly unpredictable path my life has taken. In high school, my dream job was to be a band director which led to me majoring in music education. My junior year of undergrad, I discovered new music and switched my major to composition. After completing both an undergrad and masters degree in composition, I ended up going corporate, and what started out as a temp job in data entry quickly turned into a promotion to Business Analyst and then Systems Analyst – all positions that I shockingly really enjoyed. After three years, I almost moved to California to dive deeper into a career in data analytics before abruptly and unexpectedly being pulled back into music education by landing the job at Tulane. Starting out as a drumline instructor, I eventually got promoted to Assistant Director of Bands and had almost full autonomy in running the athletic band program.

From the outside, one could view this 20+ year journey as a lesson about persistence – although I went through twists and turns, I eventually reached my long-desired destination of becoming a band director. But while this doesn’t feel 100% wrong, it’s not quite right either because at the time when I was deep in corporate life, I was 100% convinced that my music career was over and that my dream of becoming a band director was dead. In fact, if you had asked me at any point during this journey, “where do you want to be or think you’ll be in five years?”, every single answer at any given point in that timeline would have been wrong.

Never mind that that decades long dream that I imagined would be my last career stop turned out, well, not to be.

All of this has led me to an understanding that those sorts of questions, while helpful for those who need those hardline long-term goals to find focus in their careers or lives, are not compatible with my mindset. The circuitousness of my career (and life) and the unpredictable and uncertain nature is something that I’ve come to embrace, allowing me to actively adapt to any given situation without settling on one and being open to and seizing on unexpected opportunities when they cross into my line of sight. I’m not navigating my life journey so much towards a destination but a direction, keeping my eyes on the road, but letting metaphorical interesting exits or sudden road closures take me not off course, but a redefining of what is on-course.

That said, I think the spirit of that original question “does freelancing look like you thought it would four years later?” can be answered with a slight reframing – “how do you feel about being a freelancer four years later?” And that answer is simple: I feel great. I’ve accomplished so much in ways that I never could have predicted, and in ways that I would not have been able to while still working full-time. And while I am confident that this leg of my journey is far from over and I’ll easily admit that I do have some new broad and open-ended goals, my answer for what I think will happen five years from now remains relatively unchanged:

For those that made it down this far, thanks so much for reading. And please feel free to reach out and say hello.

As always, happy new music making!

Support my work!

Donate to me directly:

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The Spring Sprint Has Begun – Mendel’s Newsletter #5 (Mar 26)

Mendel Lee — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 21:41:29 +0000

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The Spring Sprint Has Begun

Mendel’s Newsletter #5 (March 2026)

The time period between Mardi Gras (which was middle of February this year)

The Spaces Between is being included on a new album!

A while back, I wrote a retrospective about how the creation and subsequent success of this percussion quartet transformed my mindset as a composer, particularly in helping me abandon self-inflicted barriers. I’m still amazed at how impactful the work remains five years later and how it continues to reach new milestones, and I am forever grateful to Chris Whyte with the Portland Percussion Group for including it on their upcoming album release.

Album cover for Patterns and Form – artwork by Trevor Calabro

The album, titled “Patterns and Form”, is being released on February 20th (just after Mardi Gras season!) on New Focus Recordings. You can purchase or preorder it here.

I’m stoked that the piece that will not only reach new audiences, but that it will give existing fans of the work the opportunity to stream or buy the recording. I do have a mechanical license for the work, which means that while I don’t earn direct profit from sale of the album itself, I do earn a veeeeeeeeerry small amount of money any time the album is sold physically or digitally and any time that the work is streamed.

As always, you can also directly support my work:

Donate to me directly!

Donate to Versipel New Music!

But also, say hello!

The coming months are going to include a flurry of activity for me. More than anything else, I value the connections I’m able to make and maintain, so I share this calendar of events (a combination of composition, Versipel New Music, and Rhythm X events that I have a hand in) to encourage you to find me and say hello if our paths happen to intersect.

Happy Mardi Gras season, and happy new music making!

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Year in Review – Mendel’s Newsletter #3 (Jan 2026)

Mendel Lee — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 16:15:00 +0000

2025 Year In Review

Mendel’s Newsletter #3 (January 2026)

As I was scrolling through my Bluesky feed around the beginning of the 2026, there were quite a few “good riddance to 2025” sentiments.

Of course, this is understandable. We are, not to sugarcoat it, living in a shitty time in US history. But as I was reflecting on my life and career this past year in preparation for this newsletter, I came to a surprising conclusion:

2025 was actually a pretty great year for me.

It’s strange to admit this. Typically I navigate the day to day feeling I’m not doing enough. That’s not necessarily because I don’t recognize when I accomplish something, but I have a habit of checkboxing any milestone large or small unceremoniously and then immediately moving on to the next thing with little to no self-congratulation. (Put together a performance at the World Expo in Dubai? Check. Perform on stage with New Kids on the Block? Check.)

It’s also strange to declare that 2025 was a great year personally when housed within a shitty 2025 nationally/globally. I’m fortunate enough to have not been individually targeted by our current administrations’ policies and agendas, but the fact remains that I do feel like a target. I’m Asian-American, politically progressive, and a New Orleans resident. My rights and my quality of life as a US citizen are tangibly worse by merely existing with these labels.

But my motivation to persist, create, and to forge ahead in my life comes from amplifying small victories as the foundation for a more optimistic future. Or put more simply, hope is how I fight. So while I am not burying my head in the sand regarding our current political climate, this year in review will be filtered through a personal celebratory lens as ammunition to persist in defiant hope and defy the mentality of inevitability and defeat.

Versipel New Music and Batture Contemporary

Rehearsal during Batture Contemporary – photo: Mendel Lee

Two years ago, I expressed to Stephen Montalvo that I wanted to do a nienteForte concert that was a Call For Scores targeting Louisiana composers. Stephen’s response was “nF shouldn’t do that, Versipel New Music should do that.”

That response is the origin story of both the merger/acquisition of nienteForte into Versipel New Music, my appointment as Executive Director, and the launch of Batture Contemporary, a Louisiana-focused new music festival this past September.

I’ve been the ED for six months now, and it has been a wild journey. While I and the org are still going through some growing pains, and I have a biiiig list of items I still want to check off before the end of year 1, I do feel good about the progress that I’ve been able to spearhead, and I appreciate all of the support I’ve received both within and outside of the org.

Other Professional Endeavors

SynchroLicity at the Alberta Abbey – photo: Jonathan Marrs

In addition to my duties with Versipel New Music, I’ve had a whirlwind of other projects and endeavors that made 2025 particularly busy. A few of these included:

Composition: 2025 saw two of my newest works get world premiere performances (Leaf in February and The Great Boil Escape in September), along with a performance of my marimba duet Polarities as a part of the Central Washington New Music Festival in October. Aside from that, I also started work on the new Mantra Percussion project that I talked about in my last newsletter.
SynchroLicity: I had the great fortune of being a part of
two events with the SynchroLicity Collective – a cohort artist residency at the Sitka Center for Arts and Ecology in April and a live taping performance at the Alberta Abbey in October.
Rhythm X: In February, I accepted the role of Board Vice-President of Rhythm X. This shifted my focus on the Board from executing on specific initiatives to oversight of all of them.
Sonic Bayou Hosting LLC: In 2025 I founded a new LLC, and I’ve been focusing heavily on the set up for the past couple of months. This new company is designed as a low-profit domain hosting and web design company specifically for the arts in my region.

From the outside it may look crazy for me to be tackling so many large-ish projects, but a big part of my work and life paradigm leverages how I use different foci as palette cleansers for each other to stay productive – if I need a break from a grant application, I’ll work on some notation; if I’m struggling with a section of music I’m writing, I’ll tackle some website updates. Jumping from thing to thing helps me continually move forward in slow but steady paces.

That said, there is definitely a balancing act to ensure that nothing in my life professionally and personally is truly neglected, and while I’m confident that I haven’t gone over capacity, I think it’s important for me to recognize that I’ve hit my limit. So while 2025 ended up being primarily about growth and expansion, my mantra for 2026 is going to be “sustain” – maintain and establish a regular rhythm for the projects I’m doing and the systems I’ve built and only start something new when I finish something else.

Life.

cake from Haydel’s Bakery. Yum. photo: Mendel Lee

There was a lot to celebrate personally in 2025 – my nephews had a child, as did two of my best friends in New Orleans, and my platonic life partner got married, just to name a few. But by far, one of the strongest moments this past year was that Hannah and I turned 50 this past year, and we hosted a big party. We rented a local movie theater to put Monty Python and the Holy Grail up on the big screen, and we then had a crawfish boil/party at our house.

What was amazing about it was that out of the 50ish attendees, every age decade was represented starting with my parents in their 80s and ending with our friends’ newborn this past January. It was really special to be the conduit to bring this diverse group of local and distant friends and family together to celebrate us and each other.

And that’s really the central theme of my life. Practically all of the professional and personal decisions I make are fueled by my desire to cultivate communities, and 2025 was not only a strong showcase of my work in fostering new communities, it was also a good reminder of the existing communities I’m fortunate enough to be a part of.

So I look ahead to 2026 with humble gratefulness and a relaxed but firm determination. The US may be a dumpster fire of doom and gloom headlines, but I’m surrounded by great people and organizations that have the same if not more determination as me to remain vigilant in our defiance of that narrative being more than a blip in our history. Everyone has a right to live their best lives and diversity is our biggest strength, and the resonance of that message reinforced all around me is what actually feels inevitable to me.

Thanks for reading!

I am, as always, immensely grateful for those that are interested enough in me that they indulge these thoughts and expressions, so for those of you who made it this far – thank you. If you’re interested in supporting my continuing journey through life, there are two direct ways you can support my endeavors:

Donate to me directly!

Donate to Versipel New Music!

You can also support me by spreading the word about my work, buying my music, or just reaching out and saying hello.

Thanks again for reading.

Happy new year, and happy new music making,

PS: We also got a cat!

Meet Nightwing. photo: Mendel Lee