This article is reposted from the Lansing City Pulse, written by Lawrence Cosentino.
Jean Lee’s job requires her to keep her eyes and ears on the present moment, the near future and generations to come.
“There really isn’t anything else like it at Michigan State University,” Lee said. “It’s kind of a two-part job.”
As instructor and coordinator of string music education at MSU — a teacher and a teacher of teachers — she believes that the joy of music making should be a part of everyone’s life, not just the rich kids.
Her most cherished goal is to bridge the gap between the small coterie of kids whose parents fixed them up with private lessons in toddlerhood and kids like herself who grew up without that advantage, wherever they come from.
“We have a shortage of string teachers in this country,” she said. “And here I am trying to rebuild, trying to get those string teachers out into the field, out into Title 1 schools in low-income areas, rural programs, wherever they end up, introducing music education to communities or bringing it back after it’s been cut. That’s the root of it.”
Although Lee is the newest member of MSU’s music education faculty, she’s already made huge strides toward rebuilding the string music education program, recruiting students from around the state and nearly quadrupling its size.
“When I was hired in January 2023, we only had 11 applications for undergraduate strings, and that includes performance and education,” she said. “A year later, it grew to around 30 applications. I just got the numbers for this year, and we’re up to 50 undergraduate applications for strings.”
Her classroom motto is simple: “Joyful lessons are effective lessons.”
“Having lived through my own issues with anxiety and perfectionism and all of that, I think about what I needed when I was a child,” she said.
Fear and intimidation have no place in her pedagogical repertoire.
“It’s such a personal, artistic craft,” she said. “If they don’t feel safe, my students aren’t going to feel free enough to express themselves musically with me or make music with me.”
That simple grounding applies across the range of Lee’s students, from 4-year-olds to 40-year-old adult education students.
“A good teacher is good at putting themselves in their students’ shoes,” she said. “When you’re teaching a classroom with 50 10-year-olds, you have to be not only efficient and organized, but you have to provide a place for 50 different personalities.”
Lee started playing violin relatively late, around 12 years old. Her parents owned Twichell’s Dry Cleaners and Tailors on M.A.C. Avenue in East Lansing.
“My parents were immigrants trying to make ends meet,” she said. “My dad was trying to finish his studies at MSU. I didn’t start my formal training until much later.”
Her parents encouraged her love for music, and they were proud that the Spartan Marching Band had its uniforms cleaned and altered at Twichell’s.
Lee’s first teaching job after graduating from MSU was leading a music production class at Sexton High School for about four years.
“We had no equipment,” she recalled. “We had PCs and these dinky MIDI keyboards, no preamps or software.”
The Sexton job taught her that if the spirit and the will to make music is there — and it almost always is, in human beings of every size — a good teacher can make it work.
“We did whatever the students wanted to do,” she said. “They had no formal training, but they had really good ears. We did gospel, we did a lot of things. I had a student who’s a pretty well-known composer in LA now who started out by making beats using the keyboard and the little drum sound effects. We just tried to make something out of nothing.”
A genuine love for pop music keeps her in touch with the musical lives of her students. In high school, she played in a cover band that specialized in the songs of Stevie Nicks.
“The students, once they get to know me, know I’m all about everything K-pop,” Lee said. Korean pop, a fabulous faraway factory where the most sugary, pink and gummous earworms in the world are extruded, is her unabashed passion. The Bangtan Boys (or BTS) are a big favorite.
“Right now, I can’t get ‘APT.’ by Bruno Mars and Rosé out of my mind,” she said.
A Bach chaconne is great, but you haven’t lived until you’ve heard Rosé beckon you to her “apateu, apateu, apateu” (Korean for “apartment”).
In recent years, Lee is seeing more young people gravitate to string instruments and more people under 35 including classical music in their concert-going life and Spotify playlists.
“Social media plays a huge part in that,” she said. “Concert musicians like Ray Chen are so accessible, showing their personalities and making it really funny.”
Music schools, camps and other arts groups throughout the Midwest constantly call on Lee’s expertise and enthusiasm as a conductor, clinician, Suzuki violin teacher and competition judge. At MSU, Lee is busy weaving a stringy web of community partners.
“We work with incredible people like LaVonté Heard, who’s trying to bring high-quality music education back into the formal curriculum in neighborhood Lansing schools,” Lee said. Heard is a powerhouse vocalist, a committed teacher, director of the Transcendence Performing Arts Center and artistic director of Lansing’s Verna D. Holley Project gospel ensemble.
“That’s where my passion for it gets to flex itself a little bit, by hooking up with such incredible visionaries like him,” Lee said.
The more effective she is at her job, the more her services are in demand. Still, she manages to recharge, whenever possible, by curling up with her Kindle.
“The first thing I did when I woke up today was download Rebecca Yarros’ ‘Onyx Storm,’” she said. (It’s the latest in a series of best-selling fantasy books that will soon be made into a TV series.) “In weather like this, give me a fuzzy blanket, my Kindle reader and a mug of tea, and I’ll be very happy.”
