We recently connected with Joe Fee and have shared our conversation below.

Joe , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

I am currently finishing the music to a new work for music and dance that I am very excited about. It was commissioned by the National University of the Arts in Taiwan and will be choreographed by Tsai Hsi Hung. Performances will take place in Taipei, Taiwan in May.

The music explores textures produced by electric guitars and keyboards in combination with cello, percussion, and Japanese flutes. It’s been exciting to see how these instruments relate to each other as well as trying to find interesting ways to record them. I’ve been creating soundscapes that I hope will immerse the audience in a cinematic type of flow. I’m looking forward to sharing it with the audiences of Taiwan and hope to bring it to the States if possible. More info will be coming soon on my site.

Joe , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I started out by playing drum set and guitar in rock bands in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the New York area. Shortly after, I studied classical and world music. In New York, I freelanced as a percussionist and had the opportunity to play a wide variety of music from orchestral to gamelan and musical theater. From 2007 to 2014, I had the pleasure of playing with the micro tonal ensemble Newband, where I performed the stage works of famed American composer Harry Partch on his original instruments. Partch’s music used different tuning systems, something I continue with my own compositions. He also combined the aesthetics of different world cultures such as Japanese Noh theater, Native American dance, and Ancient Greek drama, unifying them into a cohesive whole. This has been very inspiring for me and continues to influence my aesthetic.

In 2016, i decided to focus primarily on composition, especially music for live dance. I love to combine instruments from different world cultures. My compositions frequently use Western and Eastern instruments as well as a large array of percussion. I am very inspired by myth and ritual as well as setting literary texts to music. When Covid hit, I was preparing a production of a comic piece I wrote using a part of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as well as a short dance film based on the Greek myth of Aktaion. I hope to revive these works soon. For the future, I also have a great interest in writing film scores.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I feel that there are so many avenues available to artists now and my main goal is to interact with the audience as much as possible. I look at my music compositions as being fluid and I enjoy creating work that can exist in multiple mediums. Many of my pieces are performed live but also exist as audio recordings, music videos or short films, photography stills or prints, and promo material on social media. Each medium provides a new way of looking at the themes of the piece. I hope that this will allow the audience to engage with the work in different ways and open up different interpretations.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

I recently read Mary Blume’s biography of the fashion designer Balenciaga and was very inspired by it. I love how the best fashion designers are able to create a multitude of forms while maintaining a stylistic unity. Balenciaga was one of the masters of this, of course. I also like how he was able to innovate new forms while still retaining a feeling of tradition and history. In this vein, Dana Thomas’ book on Alexander McQueen and John Galliano, “Gods and Kings,” was really influential for me as well. McQueen’s shows were dynamic performances in their own right and it was great to learn more about them through the book. In fact, I think it would be fun to write music for a runway show because I am attracted by visual forms that are simple in structure. It seems to me that the simpler the form, the more freedom you have in exploring its emotional potential.

Contact Info:

• Website: joe-fee.com
• Instagram: joefeemusic
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwiAFIu0mhaX0UBOvo__2ZA @joefee1085

Image Credits
Photos taken from a short film study titled “Aktaion.” by Joe Fee.