What a great time in NYC

I had such wonderful time in NYC.
Working with ETHEL for new piece "The ritual of white mountain".
Reviews,
from Consequence of Sound and NYTimes

The city by the bay has long had a close relationship with the Far East, and Dohee Lee’s hauntingly gorgeous string quartet HonBiBaekSan (The Ritual of White Mountain) seemed to celebrate her dual identity as a modern composer and Korean-American. Pentatonics and plucked strings that sounded like the traditional Korean gayageum mingled with pre-recorded sounds of wind, chanting voices, and deep, woody drums, but then built toward frenzied peaks of fast, rhythmic bowing. The climaxes were brought back down to earth with dripping glissandi and angry, wailing shrieks on the strings, before the recorded percussion initiated a driving, four-on-the-floor beat. Over this modern texture created by the sounds of traditional instruments, ETHEL crescendoed into a unison tremolo groove to cap this transcendent piece.

The pentatonic consonance and intensity of Lee’s work was matched by the dissonance, experimentalism

and another from NYTIMES

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/arts/music/meet-the-composer-studio-at-poisson-rouge-review.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

Three City Dash The Ethel ensemble in a festival of contemporary music presented by Meet the Composer at Le Poisson Rouge.

By ALLAN KOZINN

Published: April 13, 2011

Meet the Composer has always been devoted to making new music user-friendly by commissioning works and having the composers on hand to explain them to audiences. Now the organization is reconfiguring itself, and it has come up with a twist: instead of merely using its Web site to promote performances, it is staging a small festival to promote its Web site, or a section of it.

It makes sense. The new Meet the Composer Studio, at mtcstudio.org, is meant to put a spotlight on young composers and their music and to encourage new-music fans to contribute toward commissioning new works. In the studio’s current version, six composers are featured, two each from Chicago, Boston and San Francisco, and would-be patrons are offered memorabilia ($5 postcards, $25 autographed CDs) or commissioning credit ($5,000 to be listed as lead commissioner).
The organization’s Three City Dash festival is built around new works by the six composers, along with older scores by colleagues in their home cities. The subject of the second installment, on Monday evening at Le Poisson Rouge, was San Francisco, and two ensembles — Ethel and Alarm Will Sound — did the honors.
The centerpiece of the set by Ethel, the string quartet, was Dohee Lee’s “HonBiBaekSan” (“The Ritual of White Mountain”), a programmatic piece that describes, however abstractly, the mystical interactions of a shaman and a group of mountain spirits.
The work begins with an electronic track that paints a vivid picture of the shaman’s realm, with howling sounds offset by steady percussion and a modal vocal chant. When the quartet finally joins in it produces a parade of sharply etched portraits of the spirits and their individual struggles, with flecks of pentatonic melody, brash repetitive sawing, and in the end (when the shaman’s beat returns), a peaceful chordal resolution.

Let's keep this life journey going...
I am very happy...