I start this newsletter in the wake of the news that Sir Patrick Stewart, one of the most iconic figures in the entertainment industry, has recently passed away.

Patrick Stewart at the 70th Annual Peabody Awards Luncheon Waldorf-Astoria Hotel
photo: Anders Krusberg

There are many tributes to Stewart that would do much more justice to his legacy than anything I would write myself, and I encourage you to find them and read more about who he was and how he carried himself. The primary reason I bring him to this newsletter is how much he credits public arts education as his origin story.

…a scholarship enabled him to attend the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, an opportunity otherwise beyond his family’s means…In later interviews, Stewart repeatedly criticised reductions in public funding for the arts. He understood that a theatrical education could be inaccessible to talented young people without financial assistance. His objections to Conservative arts policy were grounded in his own experience of what publicly supported opportunity could achieve.^[1]

This feels particularly poignant in today’s current political climate where support for the arts at the federal and state level continue to shrink despite a decently sized degree of advocacy and sentiment from him and people like him. The journey of a young Patrick Stewart in today’s world could easily be that of a pipe dream of becoming an actor being unrealized because it is financially out of reach. A potential as a legacy maker decades from now may never be known because that talent is never given the opportunity to flourish.

Public arts made Patrick Stewart a household name, and the world is better off because of him.

Stewart’s breakout success in the mainstream entertainment industry gave him a large megaphone to wield on behalf of arts advocacy. The more I read about how he amplified that message, it got me thinking about my own efforts as a new music advocate and ways that they compare and contrast with his. I mean that not just from a notability perspective – in some ways it’s laughable to compare Stewart, an iconic global celebrity, to me, a random small-name New Orleans-based composer – but also in how our end goals, and therefore our approach, differ because of the specific fields for which we are advocating.

Classical music is a niche art form in comparison to mainstream television, and new music is a niche within that niche. My success as a creative practitioner may be influenced and inspired by some of the classical musicians you can find on wikipedia, but the ones who I had or have a direct relationship with who have deeply impacted my life do not and likely will never meet that ‘notability’ criteria (mostly). This is hardly a value judgement – most composers whose practice steers in the avant garde/experimental orbit (myself included) don’t compromise their creative voices in an effort to gain notoriety, and it would be disingenuous to promote the notion that notability and widespread recognition at a Beyoncé-like scale is a pinnacle for our particular slice of our creative field.

That said, the fact that celebritydom is not where I steer my journey has a side effect that there is an upper limit to the size of the arts advocacy megaphone that I will ever be given. That’s compounded by some key elements of my particular creative practice. For example, my music tends to be non-programmatic. Unlike composers who write music as a platform to express explicit positions such as solidarity for the trans community or protest against the Russia-Ukraine War, I generally write music to explore abstract sonic experiences and avoid using it as a platform to express symbolic messaging. A majority of my messaging is simply, “I hope you think this sounds cool.”

So when it comes to my work as a composer, I have a fairly small sphere of influence. I will say that I recognize that this is partially a product of the fact that my pivot to composition as a career is still relatively recent, and that that sphere of influence is continuing to grow. I’m particularly encouraged by the ongoing relationships that I’ve been able to establish in the past few years with more prominent new music ensembles like Mantra Percussion and Missing Piece, and that I’ve been given more publicity thanks to The Spaces Between being on Portland Percussion Group’s album Patterns and Form. Even so, these relationships and others are still growing and do not yet translate to consistently paid work, so more of my personal megaphone has to prioritize “support me!” more than “support new music!”

This is why Versipel New Music is so important to me, because while the success of my compositional career requires me to focus attention directly on me, the success of Versipel New Music requires me to redirect any attention that may fall on me to the mission and the community that the organization is cultivating. Within Versipel, I am just one small megaphone among a strong and growing community of people, each with their own megaphones, and our message is continuing to grow in strength and expand its circumference. Versipel New Music may not be a national household name, but we definitely have notoriety in New Orleans, and we’ve expanded and continue to expand our recognition in the state of Louisiana, the Gulf South, and pocket communities around the globe.

But even beyond that, we are just one small faction of the hundreds of thousands of new music organizations and individuals who are wielding the arts advocacy megaphone everywhere. Not only are there are the composers, performers, ensembles, curators, and culture bearers, but there are also the grantmakers, donors/funders, educators, volunteers, and audience members that feel strongly enough about the arts that they dedicate their time, energy, and money to ensure it is able to thrive. The more I see it, the more I recognize its power. It’s invigorating and inspiring in ways that are impossible to put into words.

Because new music and its community are both one thing and many things. It’s one large group made up of many small groups. Those small groups are made up of even smaller groups. Those smaller groups are made up of passionate individuals. And when we as individuals are raise our collective megaphones together and in even vaguely in the same direction, our advocacy voice is deafening.

So for you, dear newsletter follower, I offer this challenge as we ramp up to the end of 2026: be a megaphone. help other megaphones grow. Find where your local or regional arts makers are and support them. Go to the concerts, the gallery openings, the theater shows, the book readings, the exhibitions. Find and engage with their online content directly to defy the algorithms that punish them. Contribute to their end-of-year fundraising campaigns (you can get an early bird start on ours!), even if it’s a small amount. And reach out and let them know that you see them and that you appreciate them.

Because art is not a luxury, it is an essential ingredient to life and something that belongs to all of us. And for it to continue, for us to usher in the next generation of Patrick Stewarts, we all need to raise our advocacy megaphone and sing.

Upcoming Events!

November 22nd – 7:30pm – New Marigny Theatre – The Versipel Collective presents “Slumber”, a concert featuring a collection of music around sleep and the human condition

December 6th – 4:00pm – Bridgeport Music Collective – Missing Piece with guest violist Michal Hall will be world-premiering my newest work, An Insistence For Something Greater

January 15th – 7:00pm – Kimball Union Academy – The Music of Mendel Lee, an entire evening of my works, including maybe one or two works specifically for the talented Kimball Union Academy staff.

Thanks as always!

As always, a majority of the work that I’m doing for myself and for the organizations I am a part of could always use more direct support. If you want to help me pay the bills, pay my dedicated and passionate Versipel New Music staff and colleagues, and continue what I’m doing:

Donate to me directly:

Donate to Versipel New Music:

Until next month, happy new music making!

Last month I teased some big news about some upcoming personal projects. Well, since that newsletter, there’s one other big piece of news that I’m excited (and a little baffled) to share.

Before I get into it though, a quick housekeeping note: I’ve migrated my newsletter away from Mailchimp to MailPoet. This solves a problem I was having where Mailchimp’s content ecosystem was pretty closed off – aside from the direct email delivery, my newsletters existed on an obscure Mailchimp URL outside of my website. I tried numerous ways to migrate that content into my website, but none of them worked in a way that wouldn’t have required a lot of extra work.

Mailpoet is a WordPress plugin that allows me to take posts I write directly on my WP-based website to email subscribers. That means that the newsletters natively live on my own site in an ecosystem for which I have more ownership and more control. There are also some Mailpoet features that I plan to implement in the future that will offer up more flexibility to my wonderful subscribers.

There may be some translation problems between how these newsletters look on my website versus how they are delivered to your inbox – if you notice anything that seems off in content or formatting, please feel free to reach out to me.

Enough of that! Here’s the exciting things happening!

Missing Piece is world-premiering my new work in December!

Over the summer, Missing Piece commissioned me to write them a new work. As of early October, i have given that work a double-bar, and they’re going to premiere it in Chicago with their colleague and new music violist extraordinaire Michael Hall this December. They’re also giving it another performance in New Orleans in March of 2027 with Sixto Franco, the Versipel Collective violist who is also my colleague and friend.

The piece, An insistence For Something Greater, has some creative parallels to my percussion quartet The Spaces Between – towards the end of my deadline for giving Missing Piece the final score, I was struggling with the material that I had been writing for them – music that I was and am still fond of, but the deadline pressure was paralyzing my ability to work out the structure of what I was trying to do with the piece. As a result, like what I did with The Spaces Between, I ended up tossing it on a mental “For Later” shelf, started completely over, and wrote a new piece from scratch in a furious 3-4 day period from a more intuitive compositional place.

I’m really happy with how it turned out – it definitely has the fingerprints of my strongest creative influences in it between my love of drumline-like interlocking rhythmic systems/grooves and the instincts I have for harmonic richness that comes from both my favorite minimalist composers and electronica artists, as well as the kind of harmonic writing I did with my marching band arrangements. I’m excited for Dan, Kelly, and Michael to bring the piece to life for the first time. If you happen to be in the Chicago area, please come to the show and say hello. The concert is on December 6th, at Dan and Kelly’s community space, the Bridgeport Music Collective, located in Chicago.

For your GRAMMY® Consideration!

Speaking of The Spaces Between, I’m stoked to announce that the New Focus Recordings album that it was released on this past year, the Portland Percussion Group’s Patterns and Form, is up for a GRAMMY® consideration in Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance! It continues to amaze me how much the work is still spreading its wings and reaching more people. If you have not already seen the excellently produced music video for the piece, I encourage you to watch it. I remain, as always, humbled and grateful for the Portland Percussion Group’s advocacy for the work that has brought it this far, and I also offer thanks to New Focus Recordings for putting the album up for consideration.

Be sure to spread the word! You can buy/stream the album in all of the normal places and support them and all of the composers featured on the album. A huge congratulations to them for reaching such an important milestone, and I look forward to what comes next for them.

A Full Evening of my music in New Hampshire

Finally, I’ve been given the unique opportunity to be the featured composer for the “Flick Gig” series at Kimball Union Academy in Meriden, NH! This is thanks to my very good friend and former roommate/coworker/music partner in crime Mark Lighthiser who has consistently been an advocate for my creative practice throughout our friendship. The concert will be a Mendel Music extravaganza, featuring both acoustic and fixed media works that I’ve written over the past five or so years, and maybe a new work that I write specifically for the show. We’ll see if I have time between now and then to pull it off.

I have to say that I’m really grateful to Mark for giving me the platform to do this. It is incredibly rare for composers to have a whole concert devoted to entirely their music, and I intend to take full advantage of the opportunity. This will be the first time that I get to showcase my music in the New England area, and I’m excited to get some great performances and hopefully make some lasting connections in the new music community up there.

All of this honestly leaves me a little speechless. I’ve written before about how I don’t seriously set long-term goals, and my general ‘heads-down-and-do-the-work’ mentality doesn’t afford me a lot of space to assess or reflect on career milestones.

Truth be told, this newsletter is one of the things that forces me to step back and realize the significance of news like this in ways that sharing via social media never did. That deserves its own newsletter or blog entry, but the TL;DR is that prioritizing a (mostly) regularly cadenced newsletter to a dedicated listserv makes for a more genuine self-acknowledgement of my milestones.

For that, I give thanks to my direct subscribers. Even if you don’t read every detail, even if there are newsletters that you don’t open at all, this format gives me the platform to express myself in a way that is truly myself and at a depth that socials no longer has. It’s been an interesting addendum to my creative journey, and I look forward to what I deliver to you – and to myself – in the future.

As always, a majority of the work that I’m doing for myself and for the organizations I am a part of could always use more direct support. If you want to help me pay the bills and continue what I’m doing:

Donate to me directly:

Donate to Versipel New Music:

That's all for now! Thanks so much for being here, and until next month, happy new music making!

I’m excited to announce some big news: nienteForte Contemporary Music is merging with Versipel New Music. I’ve been appointed the new Executive Director of Versipel New Music and will still act as an interim Co-Artistic Director for nienteForte. Founding Director of Versipel New Music Kari Besharse will be stepping more fully into her role as Artistic Director, focusing on the Versipel Collective.

The joint effort to make this merger happen has been a few years in the making thanks to the efforts of me and Kari along with Versipel New Music’s Assistant Director Phil Scheussler and nienteForte’s Outreach and Operations Director Stephen Montalvo. The merger represents a recognition that combining our individual efforts into a singular unified entity will better serve our shared mission to celebrate and amplify new music in our region.

I’m grateful to be given this opportunity and have three primary objectives as the new Executive Director of this merged organization: focus, unify, and grow.

1. Focus

One of the strongest motivators for this merger is a desire to bring into sharp focus the roles that Versipel New Music and nienteForte play as New Orleans-based new music entities. nienteForte has established its brand as a new music residency series featuring concerts, masterclasses, and student-reading workshops from world-renowned new music performers and ensembles from across the globe. Versipel New Music has established its brand as a New Orleans-based collective of performers and composers dedicated to concert performances that showcase the best in new music today. We’re steering the events we curated as separate organizations towards these more precise brand definitions under the new unified organization, allowing both the Versipel Collective concerts and the nienteForte residencies to hone in on their strengths and offer more support so we can continue to curate new music in the ways that our community has come to expect.

2. Unify

Collaboration has been a core tenet between Versipel New Music and nienteForte even before we started discussions of merging. This comes from a philosophy we all share that the community we serve is made stronger when we work together. As the new Executive Director, I’m establishing a stronger framework designed to elevate and unify our operations as a single organization. This framework is multifaceted with various pillars that range from big picture goals of better defining our mission and vision to detailed goals of streamlining how we operate including scheduling, communications, and fundraising strategies. Additionally, the Versipel New Music brand will be used to advocate for and support projects from any of the talented individuals within the organization, granting them agency and independence within our roof. Establishing and guiding these pillars will be instrumental in reducing the barriers that interfere with our ability to spend time doing what we want to the most: making new music together.

3. Grow

The cultural vibrancy of New Orleans makes it a natural hub for new music, and Versipel New Music and nienteForte have done a lot to cultivate and foster that local community. But passion for new music in our region is not exclusive to New Orleans. Across the state of Louisiana, there is a network of individuals and organizations that share our love for new music. In the same spirit of collaboration that has driven this merger, we are launching outreach initiatives to create new connections and partnerships throughout the state, welcoming both established and emerging talent into our new music community. The first of these is Batture Contemporary, a Louisiana-focused new music festival that will have its inaugural debut this coming September. This call-for-scores festival will harness and cultivate a larger new music community by bringing composers from across the state to New Orleans to hear their work performed by the Versipel Collective. This, along with other initiatives that we will be rolling out gradually over time, will provide increased access to concert, residency, and festival opportunities, paving the way for a stronger and brighter new music identity not only in New Orleans but across Louisiana.

The Path Forward

The integration of Versipel New Music and nienteForte together opens up new doors and opportunities to fulfill our program goals while retaining the individual autonomies that have made these programs persevere for over a decade. My ultimate directive as the Executive Director is to leverage the strengths of these existing programs while simultaneously establishing new ways for us to engage with our community, cementing a stronger and larger foundation of sustainability and stability. nienteForte will continue bringing world-class new music performers and ensembles to the region for concerts, masterclasses, student readings, and workshops. The Versipel Collective will continue pushing the boundaries of its New Orleans concert programming and will also be an integral part of a new pilot program to engage with composition programs outside of New Orleans. Batture Contemporary will showcase the strongest in new music across our region. I’m excited to turn the page and guide and influence this new chapter in our organization’s history.

Diversity Still Matters

As I move into this new role, I feel it is important to make a statement on behalf of Versipel New Music regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion. Despite the potential negative impact on federal and state grant funding we may receive due to changes in philosophy and policy around diversity initiatives across the country, we will not be silenced in what we feel is our moral imperative to amplify creative voices from a wide spectrum of communities including those that have been systemically marginalized. Diversity in the arts is a strength, not a handicap, and Versipel New Music stands firm in our commitment to provide a platform for these diverse voices to be heard and given their well-earned spotlight.

Thank you.

Versipel New Music and nienteForte were both independently created to find and bring together individuals that are passionate about new music. Now, over a decade later, the strength and perseverance of both organizations are a direct result of the belief and support of the new music community that has embraced us. As we navigate this exciting new chapter of our unified venture, I wanted to say thank you. While there are still many challenges ahead of us, I am confident that with the continued support of our dedicated community of composers, performers, staff, donors, and fans, Versipel New Music will become a defining new music force in New Orleans, the state of Louisiana, and the Gulf South.

Happy new music making,

Mendel Lee

Executive Director

Versipel New Music

This was supposed to be relatively simple – I did a search for some New Orleans companies for custom shirts and stickers (I’m making an effort to support local businesses) and found a handful. I decided to start with shirts and explored prices and options for Faux Pas, a company I already had some familiarity with as we used them in the past when I was still working for Tulane Bands. I went to their website and used their mockup to place the nF logo on a blank polo to see what it would look like, and there I discovered a problem.

Recently I’ve shifted my overall brand philosophy to have “short” vs “long” versions of my various brands, and my short brands are designed to be enclosed by circles for almost all social media standards. I’ve come to appreciate the overall simplicity of short logos over long ones and prefer to use them in all sorts of marketing except when i want full banners.

I shifted my own personal “Mendel Lee” brand to its current logo years after I created the one for nF. For my own logo, I decided that the circle aspect of the logo needed further emphasizing which manifested itself as a simple thin white circle.

Granted, on some of my sub brands (Mendel Drums, Mendel Plays), I don’t have a border like this, but there’s reasons for that that are tangential to this post.

The wisdom of creating that real border was made even more clear because of my attempts to put the current nF logo with no real border on a shirt using Faux Pas’s online tools.

Basically, the black part of the logo is supposed to be considered background, and on social media and in print materials it can easily be seen as such, but on a shirt that is itself a background color, the black looks like it’s a part of the brand. No other logo’ed shirt in my memory imprints a background on top of the background of the shirt. It comes off as amateur. The alternative of eliminating the black and having it be just the nF with nothing else looks too bare.

The simple solution is to create a circle that borders the logo and have the background be transparent, similar to how my “M” brand is, but there’s a part of me that is now leaning towards creating something that is circular in shape but stylized, not dissimilar to how tapspace‘s logo, the published of my timpani solo, is stylized. A part of me balks at the idea of the complexity that that will introduce in what I feel is a simple and clean logo – especially because that then creates more complications around how that circular shape is then used in conjunction with the long banner logo – but a stronger part of me feels like it’s a good step towards further elevating the brand, something that has been slowly happening over time.

The addition of that complexity then raises an important question: what color should that shape be?

The true color scheme of the nF logo both in its short and long-form is complicated. The part that is of highest importance is the red F. The color of the “n” (and the “niente -orte” in the long logo) has been white or black as, again, a neutral part of the brand to make the red F stick out more. This is something I leaned on in particular when I was making seasonal print booklets and used that “red capital at a later point in the text” as a centralized theme.

I knew that using a pure red was a bold choice for the branding – red is rarely used for logos for both practical and philosophical reasons, but I deliberately went against the conventional wisdom because I really wanted the F to be a true exclamation point for the brand. That’s also why I wanted the everything else to be a neutral color, to make that exclamation point really stand out, and to not overwhelm the whole brand with all red.

So this creates a clear predicament around adding other design elements to the brand. If I create a stylized circular shape that is red, it could dilute the red of the F in ways that I don’t want – it could even make the white or black “n” in the short logo stand out more. On the flip side, a color associated with a stylized circular shape makes that a part of the brand, so making that black or white shifts it out of the neutral space in a way less amateur but still not too dissimilar to putting the logo on a shirt with a printed black background color.

So where does this leave me?

Two choices:

1: Stylize the circular shape but in a way that is not dominant. Something thin and emphasized towards the right could work, and then the remainder of the logo can still be black or white. If I do it the right way, I might even be able to make it work with the long logo too, although that would be challenging.

2: Introduce for the first time ever a second “true” color to the brand. Something that can act as a more neutral element that still makes the red F stand out, and one that can withstand either a dark or light background.

All of this, in addition to having to redesign the logo from scratch in Affinity Designer since I don’t have access to Adobe CC anymore *and* I don’t have access to the original font I used for the red F anymore because I no longer use Sibelius – has turned this whole “it should be easy to print shirts and stickers” into something much more complicated. We’ll see how it all plays out, but I think that what it could end up doing is making me scrap the t-shirt/polo shirt for now and instead just do a limited number of stickers – I can do a redesign of the logo and everything with it as more marketing/publicity for nF’s landmark 15th anniversary. I may even hire or consult with a graphic designer to help me fine-tune my ideas like I’m some sort of real company or something.

We’ll see.