Korean (한글)
Full bio (785 words)
Chicago-based composer Dongryul Lee (이동렬, [iː doŋ ɾjəɾ], he/him) writes music that entwines the acoustical nature of sound with clarity, pathos, and reinvented classical expression. In his work, transcendental numbers become stars; an electromagnetic dawn chorus turns out to be birdsong; a fractal leaf of just intervals grows into Goethe’s imaginary garden; the brush of acoustics paints a Holy Week Tenebrae and the Buddhist light of Amitābha. Beneath all of it runs a persistent question about how forms arise, hold, and dissolve. His longtime fascination with bells—deepened through his assistantship at the McFarland Carillon in Urbana—led to doctoral research in engineering campanology and a series of bell-inspired works including Le Tombeau de Harvey and TIMESTORY. In 2026 he received a Barlow Endowment General Commission to write a violin concerto for Miranda Cuckson and the New York–based Talea Ensemble.
Full bio (785 words)
Chicago-based composer Dongryul Lee (이동렬, [iː doŋ ɾjəɾ], he/him) writes music that entwines the acoustical nature of sound with clarity, pathos, and reinvented classical expression. In his work, transcendental numbers become stars; an electromagnetic dawn chorus turns out to be birdsong; a fractal leaf of just intervals grows into Goethe’s imaginary garden; the brush of acoustics paints a Holy Week Tenebrae and the Buddhist light of Amitābha. Beneath all of it runs a persistent question about how forms arise, hold, and dissolve. His longtime fascination with bells—deepened through his assistantship at the McFarland Carillon in Urbana—led to doctoral research in engineering campanology and a series of bell-inspired works including Le Tombeau de Harvey and TIMESTORY. In 2026 he received a Barlow Endowment General Commission to write a violin concerto for Miranda Cuckson and the New York–based Talea Ensemble.
Recent seasons have centered on Missa Laudato Si’ (2023–25), an hour-long work for soloists, SATB chorus, and sinfonietta, written in the spirit of Pope Francis’s encyclical on ecology. Its texts run from the Latin Mass and Saint Francis’s Canticle of the Creatures to the names of endangered species from the IUCN Red List, poems by a Syrian refugee child and the Korean Zen poet Shiva Ryu. Commissioned by the EcoVoice Project and premiered at Loyola University Chicago in March 2025 by the New Earth Ensemble under Kirsten Hedegaard, with Chungho Lee as piano soloist, it was described in the Chicago Classical Review as “positively apocalyptic,” music in which “quotations of the Dies Irae mingle with Buddhist chant to dispel any notion of a silver lining.”
Other recent work includes Mu-ak: Soul Unbinding (2026), premiered by Ensemble .thrum at ClarinetFest in Incheon and taken to the National Flute Association convention in Portland; The Ci(r)cadian Tree (2025), a thirty-five-minute cycle for violin and piano written for Benjamin Sung and David Kalhous, premiered at the Ear Taxi Festival and since recorded in New York; and On a Winter’s Night a Traveller (2024), which treats a neural network's failed Mozart as one of Calvino's spurious authors, premiered at New England Conservatory by Ariel Mo, a long-standing collaborator.
Other recent work includes Mu-ak: Soul Unbinding (2026), premiered by Ensemble .thrum at ClarinetFest in Incheon and taken to the National Flute Association convention in Portland; The Ci(r)cadian Tree (2025), a thirty-five-minute cycle for violin and piano written for Benjamin Sung and David Kalhous, premiered at the Ear Taxi Festival and since recorded in New York; and On a Winter’s Night a Traveller (2024), which treats a neural network's failed Mozart as one of Calvino's spurious authors, premiered at New England Conservatory by Ariel Mo, a long-standing collaborator.
Earlier work includes TIMESTORY (2021), commissioned by the University of Chicago’s Center for Contemporary Composition and premiered by the Grossman Ensemble under Vimbayi Kaziboni. Its harmony derives from computationally optimized bell models developed in his dissertation, A Thousand Bells; that research has been presented at the IRCAM Forum Workshop in Montréal and at the 2026 International Conference on Timbre. A finite island in the infinite ocean (2020), premiered by Miranda Cuckson at the 2021 Fromm Players at Harvard, was described in The Strad as a “virtuosic microtonal exercise” whose passages “sound like dense reefs of exotic corals.”
Unending Rose (2017–19), a forty-five-minute string quartet named for Borges’s poem cycle and conceived as a rosary in sound, searches for unknown consonant harmonies. The Kairos Quartett premiered the complete work at Villa Elisabeth in Berlin in 2020, with support from the Theodore Presser Foundation, Arts Council Korea, and Kultur Büro Elisabeth Berlin. Goethe’s Garden (2017), for two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart and commissioned by the 21st Century Piano Commission Award, applies a fractal algorithm to a microtonal harmonic space.
He received the Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship in 2020, which supported a year of study with Jukka Tiensuu, the Presser Foundation Award in Music in 2019, and an alternate designation for the Fromm Music Foundation Commission in 2025. Earlier honors include Third Prize at the first Bartók World Competition in Budapest (2018), awarded by a jury chaired by Thomas Adès with Unsuk Chin and Chaya Czernowin; the Special Prize Piero Pezzé at the Città di Udine competition (2018); Second Prize at the GMCL / Jorge Peixinho competition in Lisbon (2017); and Second Prize at the Busan Maru International Music Festival competition (2017). Several of his scores are published by BabelScores (Paris).
Unending Rose (2017–19), a forty-five-minute string quartet named for Borges’s poem cycle and conceived as a rosary in sound, searches for unknown consonant harmonies. The Kairos Quartett premiered the complete work at Villa Elisabeth in Berlin in 2020, with support from the Theodore Presser Foundation, Arts Council Korea, and Kultur Büro Elisabeth Berlin. Goethe’s Garden (2017), for two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart and commissioned by the 21st Century Piano Commission Award, applies a fractal algorithm to a microtonal harmonic space.
He received the Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship in 2020, which supported a year of study with Jukka Tiensuu, the Presser Foundation Award in Music in 2019, and an alternate designation for the Fromm Music Foundation Commission in 2025. Earlier honors include Third Prize at the first Bartók World Competition in Budapest (2018), awarded by a jury chaired by Thomas Adès with Unsuk Chin and Chaya Czernowin; the Special Prize Piero Pezzé at the Città di Udine competition (2018); Second Prize at the GMCL / Jorge Peixinho competition in Lisbon (2017); and Second Prize at the Busan Maru International Music Festival competition (2017). Several of his scores are published by BabelScores (Paris).
Lee is Assistant Professor of Music at Loyola University Chicago, where he coordinates theory and composition, and was the 2020–21 postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago’s Center for Contemporary Composition. He began making music at twelve building sound worlds on a computer, and remained largely self-taught into his twenties. He came to formal study late: while completing a BS in Computer Science at Yonsei University and working as a software engineer at NCSoft, he studied privately for five years before entering the Eastman School of Music as a twenty-nine-year-old freshman in 2008. He completed his MM and DMA at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, studying principally with Heinrich Taube and Reynold Tharp. A Korean immigrant, Catholic by faith and Buddhist by practice, he builds spiritual images out of numbers and forges them into sound on classical ground.
Medium bio (250 words)
Chicago-based composer Dongryul Lee (이동렬, [iː doŋ ɾjəɾ], he/him) writes music that entwines the acoustical nature of sound with clarity, pathos, and reinvented classical expression. In his work, a fractal leaf of just intervals grows into Goethe’s imaginary garden; the brush of acoustics paints a Holy Week Tenebrae and the Buddhist light of Amitābha. His longtime fascination with bells led to doctoral research in engineering campanology and a series of bell-derived works including Le Tombeau de Harvey and TIMESTORY, which combines a passacaglia with bell spectra. In 2026 he received a Barlow Endowment General Commission to write a violin concerto for Miranda Cuckson and the Talea Ensemble; his honors also include Third Prize at the first Bartók World Competition and the Piero Pezzé Prize at Città di Udine.
Recent seasons have centered on Missa Laudato Si’ (2023–25), an hour-long choral work written in the spirit of Pope Francis’s encyclical on ecology, premiered in 2025 and described in the Chicago Classical Review as “positively apocalyptic.” Other recent work includes The Ci(r)cadian Tree and Unending Rose, which the Kairos Quartett premiered in Berlin.
Lee is Assistant Professor of Music at Loyola University Chicago and was the 2020–21 postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago’s Center for Contemporary Composition. He came to formal training late: he studied composition privately while completing a computer science degree at Yonsei University and working as a software engineer, and entered the Eastman School of Music as a twenty-nine-year-old freshman. A Korean immigrant, Catholic by faith and Buddhist by practice, he builds spiritual images out of numbers and forges them into sound on classical ground.
Short bio (100 words)
Chicago-based composer Dongryul Lee writes music that builds spiritual images out of numbers and forges them into tangible sound on classical ground. In 2026 he received a Barlow Endowment General Commission for a violin concerto for Miranda Cuckson and the Talea Ensemble, and his hour-long ecological Mass, Missa Laudato Si’, was premiered in Chicago in 2025. He came to music from software engineering, entering the Eastman School of Music as a twenty-nine-year-old freshman. He was the 2020–21 postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago’s Center for Contemporary Composition and is Assistant Professor of Music at Loyola University Chicago.
Chicago-based composer Dongryul Lee writes music that builds spiritual images out of numbers and forges them into tangible sound on classical ground. In 2026 he received a Barlow Endowment General Commission for a violin concerto for Miranda Cuckson and the Talea Ensemble, and his hour-long ecological Mass, Missa Laudato Si’, was premiered in Chicago in 2025. He came to music from software engineering, entering the Eastman School of Music as a twenty-nine-year-old freshman. He was the 2020–21 postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago’s Center for Contemporary Composition and is Assistant Professor of Music at Loyola University Chicago.
I am a composer who seeks to write music that is both bodily and spiritual, intuitive and structured. I aim to reconcile and sublimate these tensions not through stylistic eclecticism, but through clarity of expression and depth of process. I conduct research in search of what I cannot yet imagine, so that imagination itself may move toward new terrain.
Other photo(s)
High resolution photo 1 High resolution photo 2 High resolution photo 3
