2010 Winner: Lembit Beecher-And Then I Remember
Lembit Beecher
Lembit Beecher’s music focuses on themes of storytelling, memory and nature. Born of Estonian and American parents, Lembit grew up under the redwoods in Santa Cruz, California, a few miles from the wild Pacific. Since then he has lived in Boston, Houston, Ann Arbor, Berlin and New York. This varied background has made him particularly sensitive to place, ecology and the strong emotional relationships that people forge with patterns in nature. He is also interested in memory and the various ways we tell stories, from emotional personal narratives to crisp and clean documentaries. Recent pieces have focused on integrating recorded interviews with music. While a fellow at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities (2008 – 2009), Lembit wrote And Then I Remember, a multi-media, documentary oratorio based on the World War II stories of his grandmother. Active also as a pianist, conductor and concertinist, Lembit graduated with his D.M.A. in composition from the University of Michigan, studying with Evan Chambers and Bright Sheng. He earned his B.A. from Harvard College, studying composition with Kurt Stallmann and Bernard Rands and his M.M. from Rice University, studying with Karim Al-Zand and Pierre Jalbert. Continually trying to expand his musical and artistic vocabulary, Lembit has studied jazz piano, modern dance, ethnomusicology and participated in workshops and master classes with Stephen Schwartz, Evelyn Glennie, Bobby McFerrin and Paul Berliner. Lembit was appointed a Visiting Assistant Professor at Denison University for the fall of 2009 and is currently a freelance composer living in New York City.
About And Then I Remember
My grandmother, Taimi Lepasaar, was born in Estonia in 1922. Four years earlier, in the aftermath of World War I, Estonia had achieved independence for the first time. This independence was short lived. During World War II, Estonia was occupied first by the Russians (1940 – 41) and then the Germans (1941 – 44). In 1944, as the Red Army was encroaching once more, my grandmother escaped Estonia along with her mother and father, husband Ants and two-year old daughter, Merike (my mother). My grandmother left on the last ship out of the country before the Russians returned and sealed the borders. The boat brought her to Germany and as the war was ending she gradually made her way west. After the end of the war, she spent four years in displaced person camps before immigrating to the United States and beginning a new life here. She found work as a church organist and later also as a music teacher. For 35 years she taught music to middle school students in Providence, RI, where she still resides.
My grandmother has often told me stories about these experiences. She is a marvelous storyteller. A few years ago I asked my grandmother if I could record her stories with the idea of possibly building a piece around them. She kindly agreed to many interviews over several years as the project gradually took shape. During the summer of 2008, as I began to work intensely on this piece, I traveled to Estonia to conduct interviews with family members and old friends of my grandmother’s, and to do archival research. My original intent was to emphasize the documentary side of the stories, including text from newspaper clippings and war time documents (like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact). But as I thought more and more about the project, I began to feel that what was really important was my grandmother’s voice and her way of telling stories to me, not the historical details of the events described. The text of the interviews with my grandmother is the core of the piece. Portions of the interviews are played back as recorded audio and I have condensed other parts of the interviews into poems of sorts, which are sung by a solo soprano.
To supplement the English language interviews texts, I have set portions of the Estonian national epic, Kalevipoeg, for a female duo and male chorus to sing. Both Kalevipoeg and my grandmother’s stories are about a wandering journey of epic nature. Both are permeated by an intense love of homeland, of Estonia, and the ruminations on memory, storytelling and the passage of time that are contained within Kalevipoeg seem to be echoed by my grandmother. I sometimes feel that I understand my grandmother’s stories in the way that Estonians of an older generation understood Kalevipoeg. The experiences my grandmother describes are so far removed from mine, in terms of time, place and intensity, that they acquire the sheen of a fantastic saga, yet at the same time, the stories feel so very personal, emotional and deeply true.
