Casey S. Lee
Casey S. Lee
Casey Lee is a Colorado-based fiddle player, teacher, composer, and multi-instrumentalist known for the unusual breadth of her musical experience. She draws from classical music, metal, and rock as well as traditional styles including bluegrass, old-time, Celtic, and Klezmer. Casey has spent more than two decades bringing sounds and techniques from different musical traditions into conversation in her performing, recording, and teaching.
In Colorado, Casey has performed with groups including The Charlie Stevens Band and Venture Still, collaborated with The Friendly Reminders and Amoeba Swing, and spent several years as the fiddler for the bluegrass-adjacent band House With a Yard. Her playing on the band’s self-released album Carousel was described by one reviewer as “hauntingly delicious.” Her twenty-five years of orchestral experience include a decade serving as concertmaster of the concert orchestra at Colorado State University (CSU), which in 2020 performed Cumberteeth, a piece composed and arranged by Casey. Casey is also the founder of Triage, a progressive folk/chambergrass ensemble.
Prior to moving to Colorado, Casey worked as a violin coach and dance fiddler for Michigan music festivals and performed, recorded, and toured with Michigan artists such as Dragon Wagon, Ghost City Searchlight, and Top Hats and Monocles. During her years with the internationally touring Saline Fiddlers, Casey was joined in concert by guest artists including Mark O’Connor, Alison Brown, The Infamous Stringdusters, and Sam Bush; opened for Reba McEntire, Rodney Atkins, and others; and performed at venues including Hill Auditorium and the White House.
Casey is an enthusiastic string teacher with a cross-genre, multi-instrument private studio. She coaches fiddle and chamber groups, leads technique-specific workshops, and teaches violin with the Colorado nonprofit Off the Hook Arts. Her teaching, like her playing, emphasizes merging sounds and techniques from varied traditions. She studied string pedagogy at Colorado State University and is pursuing a teaching certificate from CSU’s Institute for Learning and Teaching.
Casey majored in biology and Environmental Studies at Oberlin College, where she also studied gender studies and religion. She is a Ph.D. candidate in ecology and teaches biology at Colorado State University. Her doctoral work lies at the intersection of animal behavior, acoustic ecology, and conservation, exploring how prairie dogs respond to anthropogenic noise.
