top of page

Sisters Original Music 

Lee Hoffman and Leslie Bevans

Lee plays the piano and sings. She has made music a profession (maintaining the love of an amateur) always eager to teach and encourage other musicians and students. Lee’s piano and vocal repertoire is vast, and she has also created a large collection of her own compositions. Lee composes, arranges, and directs large and small ensembles and choirs and performs solo concerts of all sorts of music, including her own original songs.

 

Leslie plays the flute and also sings. She writes melodies and lyrics / poems which become songs that she shares, either with accompaniment, or acapella. Leslie’s songs are often whimsical stories, lullabies, love songs, some from her written works, some from poetry prompts … 

 

Lee takes Leslie’s original melodies and creates arrangements for piano and flute accompaniment; Leslie adds flute and vocal harmonies to Lee’s original songs.

 

Leslie and Lee are sisters. They’ve been singing harmony since they were little kids growing up in a house with talented, musical parents and always a tuned-piano. As kids, they sang with the family ‘band’ sharing gospel music with people in local retirement homes and churches.

 

As grown-ups, Lee and Leslie are musical collaborators, playing and singing their original songs whenever they have the time and space. In 2016, they decided to name their duo, “Sisters Original Music.” 

 

The Age of Dancing

This song is from 'The Ways of Bees,' a song cycle by Leslie Bevans, written within the text of her book, Beyond the Weakened Thread.

 

The idea is that the princess had never learned the Ways of Bees because, as you will learn from reading the story, something untoward happens to the Queen before her and she is left to be raised by tutors and experts that assumed - because they understood things, they would be able to teach the princess.  BUT, because she threw fits about having to sit still and learn, her tutors gave up... and she grew into a miserable Queen. 

 

There was a set of books, The Ways of Bees, that her tutors failed to lean upon. This set of books included songs that taught everything a princess bee would ever need to know in order to truly become a Queen. The Age of Dancing is sung by Pertance Turtle Esquire in chapter 32 of Beyond the Weakened Thread. 

 

Leslie completed the melodies in 2015 and has performed them, acapella, at Poetry Read-Arounds in El Dorado County, just for fun. 

​

Here we are in 2024. Technology aides in collaboration. Leslie sent an accapela iPhone voice file of the song to Lee, along with a photo of the manuscript that notated the melody and some really roughed in chords... (Lee was undaunted)!  After swimming with sharks and jelly fish, Lee composed and recorded the piano accompaniment and sent it back to Leslie. Frank recorded as Leslie sang to Lee's piano. Frank then placed the finished song into a beautiful video he had made to celebrate Bees and Flowers.

You can enjoy this video in Tracks by the Post 2024 No: 19, lines and spaces

​

​

bottom of page