Jonathan Rhodes Lee is active as a musicologist and as a performer on early keyboard instruments.

As a musicologist, Lee explores interests in both 18th-century topics (particularly the works of George Frideric Handel) and film music. He has published articles in Cambridge Opera Journal, Eighteenth-Century Music, Music and Letters, The Journal of Musicology, the Händel-Jahrbuch, the A-R Music Anthology, and The Heroic in Music (Boydell, 2022). His book, Film Music in the Sound Era: A Research and Information Guide, was published in 2020 by Routledge. Lee also issued the first volume of Pierre Nicolas La Font’s harpsichord works with A-R Editions in 2016.

Lee’s research and creative activity have been supported by the Nevada Arts Council, the James R. Anthony Endowment (funded by the American Musicological Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), the Society for Theatre Research (U.K.), the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fund, the Netherlands-America Foundation, and the Fulbright Scholar Program. He was the winner in 2022 of the Ruth Solie Prize of the North American British Music Studies Association, given for what it deems “the most outstanding article on a subject in British music” published over the previous two years.”

Lee has performed as harpsichord soloist and continuo player across North America and Europe. He can be heard on the MSR, Equilibrium, and Navona labels, and he has appeared with organizations such as the Arizona Bach Festival, the Las Vegas Philharmonic, the Las Vegas Sinfonietta, Mercury Baroque (Houston), the New Century Chamber Orchestra (San Francisco), Cosmopolitan Baroque (Las Vegas), the San Antonio Symphony, and others. Lee holds degrees from Colgate University, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and the University of California, Berkeley, and he was a Fulbright Scholar at the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague, Netherlands. His harpsichord teachers have included Joscelyn Godwin, Laurette Goldberg, Davitt Moroney, and Jacques Ogg.