Lee Kesselman's deeply intelligent and heart warming works offer singers of every age a wealth of new ideas.!
For every artist, it seems, there is a moment of reckoning, a time when the path ahead suddenly takes on a brilliant clarity.
For Lee R. Kesselman, that moment came as an undergraduate at little Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., where as a prelaw major he found himself bribing a janitor to get into the school’s music rooms after hours to practice.
“My father was a businessman, and I had always expected to go into business or law myself eventually,” Kesselman recalls.
“Music was something I just did on the side in high school.
Lee Kesselman Guest Composer & Conductor.
But in college it suddenly occurred to me that that was what I really enjoyed. The people I liked the most were musicians, and the place I liked best was the music department.”
Kesselman never did get to the bar exam.
He earned an advanced degree in conducting at the University of Southern California in the mid-1970s, taught at smaller colleges and eventually, with wife Emily Ellsworth, a voice instructor, found his way to t