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Lembit Beecher
| Affiliation: | Faculty |
| Title: | Visiting Professor |
| Office: | Burton 208 |
| Email: |
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| Phone: |
740-587-6653
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| Fax: | 740-587-6509 |
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Lembit Beecher is a composer, conductor and pianist who recently graduated with his D.M.A. in composition from the University of Michigan, studying with Evan Chambers and Bright Sheng. Lembit 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. 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 and Berlin. 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 way people tell stories, through songs, sounds, gestures and words. For 2008-2009, Lembit was a fellow at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, where he wrote And Then I Remember, a multi-media, documentary oratorio based on the World War II stories of his grandmother. And Then I Remember was premiered on March 27 and 28 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This coming year Lembit's music will be performed by The Definiens Project at the Fresno New Music Festival, the Flexible Orchestra in New York City, The BluePrint Project in San Francisco and The University of Michigan Band in Ann Arbor.
