It might sound like hyperbole, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the Baltimore composer James Lee III really did become a musician in his mother’s womb.

“My parents told me that when my mother was pregnant, I would start moving around every time they changed the radio to the local classical music station,” Lee said, laughing a little to indicate that he takes his family story with a grain of salt. Then he added more seriously: “I have always loved classical music — the colors and the sounds, the way it moves from intimate solos into this density of texture when the whole orchestra plays.”

In September, the 48-year-old Edgewood resident will become the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s composer in residence, a partnership that will have the orchestra perform at least seven works by the Morgan State University professor within the next year, including four world premieres — a collaboration with a local musician unprecedented in the orchestra’s recent history. The residency will also include an extensive community outreach component.

Concertgoers are getting a sneak preview this weekend, when the BSO debuts Lee’s “Captivating Personas,” a 21-minute, four-movement work inspired by a series of paintings created by former Baltimore School for the Arts student Quinn Bryant.“When we have had composers in residence before, they basically wrote music and the orchestra played it,” said Brian Prechtl, a percussionist and the orchestra’s interim director of education and community engagement.

“But over the past several years, society has begun looking at legacy cultural institutions like the BSO and asking, ‘What are you doing for the places you’re serving?’ James is bringing a whole new level of community engagement to the residency program.”

As the BSO’s composer in residence next season, Lee will combine his music-writing duties for the orchestra with workshops and coaching sessions for teenage aspiring composers from the School of the Arts, OrchKids and Peabody Preparatory.

In a way, the program already has had its trial run; Lee got to know Bryant last year after he told symphony officials he was interested in writing a piece of music in response to a painting or sculpture. They sent him to meet with students at the School for the Arts, where the composer said he was “wowed” by Bryant’s figurative paintings. He found them simultaneously lifelike and mysterious, paintings that combined the old with the new — just like the music Lee tries to write.

Now a fine arts student at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, Bryant told Lee’s music publisher, the Subito Music Corporation, that in those paintings she tried to capture the spirit of women from different backgrounds working to achieve the same goals.

“I believe that unity is power,” Bryant says in an article on the publishing company website. “True power is not achieved alone. There is power in a painting of women of different cultural identities gathered around each other, supporting each other.”

Perhaps one reason the two clicked is that the composer has had lots of practice in forging cross-cultural connections.

He is a polymath who speaks five languages: English, German, Spanish and Portuguese, and is intensively studying Hebrew. Lee’s father was a pastor in the Seventh Day Adventist Church, and the composer’s musical pieces often mix Biblical passages and historic events with modern traditions. Listeners this weekend may detect echoes of a Mexican marimba in “Captivating Personas” as well as the shimmer of a tambourine.

Lee’s more than 80 compositions have been performed by a dozen orchestras throughout the U.S. and in Germany, England, Cuba, Argentina and Brazil. In the spring, he will add Denmark to the list.

“I’m interested in how cultures change how you express yourself,” Lee said, “and how language gives you insight into how people in that culture think.”

Lee, who was born in St. Joseph, Michigan, began studying music at age 12 after his father noticed his son fooling around on a toy piano and signed him up for lessons.

“I devoured the piano,” Lee said. “I would finish a different piano lesson book each week. When I misbehaved, my punishment was that I wasn’t allowed to play the piano.”

Lee originally hoped to make the piano his career. But music educators say that because of the way children’s brains develop, age 12 is often too late to begin studying a musical instrument. Lee was naturally gifted, but when he was in college, the delay caught up with him.

“I wasn’t confident that I would be able to play at a level that would sustain a performance career,” he said.

Luckily, musical ideas come naturally to Lee. About a year after he began piano lessons, he started jotting down his own piano sonatas and trios, and found that people seemed to like them. By the time he was a high school senior, Lee had become so well known for his original music that his guidance counselor made a public — and prescient — prediction.

“She said audiences would be listening to my symphonies one day,” Lee recalled.

After college, Lee switched his musical focus from the piano to composition, earning his master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of Michigan. Somewhere along the way, though, he realized he had swapped one set of career concerns for another.

“I got rid of my performance anxiety,” he said. “Instead, I wondered if any orchestra was ever going to play my music.”

He needn’t have worried.

In 2005, a teacher put Lee in touch with the famed conductor Leonard Slatkin, who agreed to look at the 14-minute composition Lee had written for his doctoral dissertation. Slatkin must have liked what he saw because the next year, the National Symphony Orchestra performed the world premiere of Lee’s “Beyond the Rivers of Vision.”

And just like that, a career was launched.

During the past 19 years, Lee’s work has been performed by some of the world’s top orchestras, but the BSO is the first to provide what will amount to a master class in the composer’s work.

BSO Music Director Jonathon Heyward said that it was a “no brainer” to dedicate part of the orchestra’s next season to an in-depth exploration of Lee’s musical ideas.

“James has gotten international attention,” he said.

“His orchestrations have gorgeous colors that capture everyone’s ears. You can instantly feel the storytelling from the first beat and the first sound you hear. That’s what makes his music so special.”