Genevieve Feiwen Lee finds it hard to explain the role music has played in shaping her life. "music is my life," says Lee, an associate professor of music. "You've only got words, and words sound clumsy or sentimental or hokey when you're trying to explain it."

Music has been part of Lee's life since her earliest memories. At four, her determination to take piano lessons surprised her parents, neither of whom played an instrument. In her first year in the Preparatory Division of The Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, at the age of 12, she performed Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major with the York Symphony. Like so much of Mozart, it sounds deceptively simple yet demands a high degree of subtlety and control. For a 12-year-old to play it in public may not have put Lee in the prodigy class, but it demonstrated a keen musical intelligence at an early age.

After graduating from Peabody in 1986, she spent a year in Paris at the Ecole Normale de Musique. After returning to the U.S., she attended the renowned Yale School of Music, earning a Doctor of Musical Arts in 1994, the year she joined Pomona's faculty.

According to Margaret Kohn, a fellow piano instructor, Lee is the latest in a series of formidable teacher-pianists on the Pomona music faculty, including Everett Olive, Daryl Dayton and John Steele Ritter. "It was not an easy task for Genevieve to follow someone like the late Peter Hewitt," says Kohn. "Peter was known for his gigantic pianism and cherished for his dogged if whimsical adherence to unadorned high standards." Undaunted, however, Lee has steadily carved out a solid place for herself with students, the department and the larger community. Lee's "piano technique is superb," adds Kohn, and "her performances are meticulously prepared and presented without obfuscating artifice."

Even on CD and tape, this writer found her concerts to be some of the most beautiful music he has ever heard. Three Etudes by Debussy, "Pour les quartes," " Pour les agréments," and "Pour les accords"--that is, fourths, ornaments and chords--the first by turns deft, vigorous and subtle, the Ornaments seductive as only Debussy can be, and the Chords, big leaping chunks of chords in three-quarter time, with an insinuating middle section. Ravel's Jeux d'eau, "a river god laughing as the water tickles him," as poet Henri de Régnier noted. Also, Ravel's Sonatine--beautiful, liquid, flowing, and above all, well organized. You hear the architecture of the piece.

These pieces are fairly well known. Less known is Olivier Messiaen's Vingt regards sur l'enfant Jésus, which might be translated as Twenty Glimpses of the Christ Child. She played the 16th, which was rather busy, and the 13th, more typical: jangling, then quiet (these are, after all, meditations), with those archetypal Messiaen chords, like colored glass panes touching each other as they turn in the air.

Lee also has gained a reputation for interpreting older works. Earlier this year, for instance, Lee and three other pianists ("The Bach Four") presented a concert of J.S. Bach's Well Tempered Clavier, a mainstay of every pianist's repertoire since its completion over 250 years ago. The quartet of pianists gave a new look to this seminal work, with a PowerPoint presentation incorporating spoken commentary and visual images.

"Bach's purpose in writing these preludes and fugues is found in the title page: ÔFor the benefit and use of musical youth desirous of knowledge.' The purpose is to teach and to be taught," Lee notes. In introductory remarks at the concert, she asked the audience, "How many of us performing pianists think of the preludes and fugues as a puzzle to be conquered? Only later do we realize the great emotional, intellectual and spiritual truths these pieces transmit." Always interested in new challenges, Lee hopes to put together an interactive CD-ROM, based on her recent multi-media presentation, and to record both books of the Well Tempered Clavier.

Lee brings equal energy to her teaching and private lessons. One afternoon last spring, senior Peter Chang arrived for his weekly lesson. Lee's office has two seven-foot Steinway grands, keyboards side by side. The lesson began with one of William Bolcom's Nine Bagatelles, which Peter was just starting, and as he remarked, finding the counting "kind of hairy." Lee asked him to play it again. She slapped the rhythm on the piano top, then got him to tap it out, "So it won't sound random," she explained. One of the Bagatelles includes a quotation from a Chopin mazurka--an interesting mixture.

They went on to the third movement of Ravel's Sonatine, with its fast alternating passage work, which Peter had been practicing for two months. She talked about pedal work (a major concern with Ravel), and suggested that it "needs to have a bit more shape." She played a passage, then they played passages together--one of the things that can inspire young musicians.

The idea of a concert career, Lee says, "is always in the recesses of your brain, but you have to be practical and realize that very few pianists make careers out of only performing. Most pianists also teach in some capacity." In addition to teaching her 19 piano students, Lee offers a variety of courses, including theory and at least one lab course.

This fall, Lee continued her foray into multimedia performance with a concert program featuring a work by Frederick Rzewski that involves playing and acting. The text is from Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, written while in prison. According to Lee, Wilde's artistic sensibility, despite his suffering, comes through. The spoken word was punctuated by piano passages, by non-playing, by Lee creating percussive sounds inside the piano and by making other nonverbal sounds. "This piece really stretched me," she confesses. "Some parts of it were very demanding--almost embarrassing--but that's why I did it."

Burf Kay obtained the degree of Associate of the Royal Conservatory of Toronto
(piano--solo performer) in 1949. A former professor of French literature,
he is currently a freelance writer and reviewer.