Leading by Example: Alysia Lee on Creative Collaboration with Students

Last month, I wrote about a conversation I had with Alysia Lee and her work, Say Her Name, which premiered in November 2020. The #SayHerName movement resists police brutality against Black women. If you say the name, you're prompted to learn the story, and if you know the story, then you have a broader sense of all the ways Black bodies are made vulnerable to police violence. In this part, we spoke about her creative collaborations with students.

For background, Alysia is the Coordinator of Fine Arts for the Maryland State Department of Education, the Founder and Artistic Director of Sister Cities Girlchoir, a faculty member at the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University, and a board member for Chorus America. In addition to serving in all of those roles, Alysia is a performer, conductor, composer, and public speaker.

Here is a transcript of our continued conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity:

Bridget Woodbury | Director of Community Engagement, Creative Generation: You’re also working with your students on their own compositions and stuff now? Is that in process? 

Alysia Lee | Singer, Composer, Arts Educator, and Arts Advocate: : Yeah. So we're doing a project called When I Sing with our partner, Intercultural Journeys. And this is an NEA sponsored project, so it's like even when COVID [started, it was] sort of like are we going to go forward with this? I mean we've been working on this project for over 18 months to prepare the Grant application — so there was a lot of prep work and a lot of dreaming.

We worked with a poet for six weeks, Denice Frohman, and she is a former world champion women's Slam Poet. It was so cool. The kids wrote original poetry and now we're in the phase of looking at those poems and using them as inspiration. We wrote two songs this weekend, which was great. We divided into two groups and wrote two songs in two hours and we will premiere a  full video performance of five songs five songs in April. and then they'll also be a digital reserve of a lot of the poetry and answers to discussion questions, and things like that, as backup materials that people can peruse. Yeah, so all of that will be available.

Then this summer the staff and I will get together and we will write out the steps. We have for, again, for the past three years been creating our own processes around composition. They have similarities and core components, and then they also have things that we individually like to do. So for instance, when I compose with kids, I like to compose collectively. Everyone's working together on the same song where one of my colleagues, Anne Dugan, likes to do more of, “okay, will you take this and go away for a few minutes and come back and bring what you got,” working independently. So there's different ways and different reasons to [build] different skills. 

But we're you know kind of putting all of that down and then sharing it out as a resource with the field. 

Bridget: Yeah for sure. Creative Generation worked on the Art Schools Network Conference a few weeks ago, and as I was sort of going through the sessions, I was really interested to hear people talking about the fact that a lot of adults don’t think kids can compose and how many access points [to composing a song] there are, so it's interesting to see a model of elevating [student] voices. 

Alysia: There are so many [access points]! I was on a panel this summer with a new music group and there was a youth composition panel and then everybody played some selections, which was cool — and we didn't have any selections because this is our first time composing something that's just the kids, but we do have pieces that we've worked with other composers on you know, so it was fascinating to hear how avant-garde the music sounded which was cool. We have five pieces: one of them is very avant-garde, but then the other pieces are like — there's one that's a ballad that I could really hear like Rihanna or Lana Del Ray singing. There's a song that sounds like Migos and then there's the other one that sounds kind of like a Dua Lipa kind of a girl-power anthem, you know. 

So they're very very pop driven and that's interesting, too, and I'm interested to see what happens with the kids as they do, you know, develop more skills and new things may come up — things that sound like new and it will be like, “whoa. I've never heard that kind of idea before” — and that's what's really exciting: to give them that space to start and then to see them feel more confident about it. “This is what I do, I sing. And being a singer means I make music sometimes and sometimes I recreate music.” I think it’s important that the music feels to them like something that they would share with their friends. 

The two pieces from this weekend were a true gift. They were really beautiful. One group was tasked with creating an anthem and another group was tasked with something else and I thought the anthem would wind up being upbeat, you know like anthems are, and it's not. It's the ballad. The one that was more futuristic and like visionary is the upbeat one. So it's like yes, it's they created every note of it. They created all the rhythms, and the melody, all the lyrics, and I think people will be really interested to hear the music. 

Bridget: I love seeing where kids are accidentally at the vanguard of culture where they're being super avant-garde because they're just like not constrained by expectations.

Alysia: Yes, yes. Yes, that's what we want more of. It's such a shame we’re in COVID, because it's harder to work collaboratively with a small group and Zoom is a barrier, but kids are so resilient and so we just show up and try to make space for the things that are important to them. 

It's something new for us, because our program is not a hip-hop program, you know, all of the teachers are classically trained, but what I think that does is allow the kids to really emerge as experts, for us to really rely on the cultural experience of lots of other folks. That’s not my areas: “hey, let's bring in somebody who's got it and we'll learn from them.” It also gives space for the kids to be like, “oh, I know exactly how to do that” and let me show you how to put together an 8 bar rap verse that is good enough for a battle, right? 

I know a lot of music programs and youth development programs are run by classical musicians. And I think this is just very important. The more we can remove the ego and [stop] centering our own knowledge, the better. Just making space for more people in your organization to come in and share and also just remembering how much your kids bring to the table. [Put them in] a position of leader more than learner. 

Bridget: Where can folks follow and support your work?

Alysia: On my website, you can see which choirs are performing Say Her Name. The Mendelssohn Chorus, for instance, in Philadelphia is doing the piece and I'll be leading it. There's more to come from this piece because, unfortunately, Black women are still getting killed by the police, so we keep the piece keeps reviving itself — which is unfortunate, but it also keeps making space for us to memorialize this way. And and to remind us to not forget them which I think is so important. 


You can also learn more about Sister Cities Girlchoir and the “When I Sing” program on their website, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Bridget Woodbury (she/her/hers) is a designer and an expert in marketing, strategic planning, and membership management. Prior to her time spent overseeing the membership program at Americans for the Arts, she wrote her Master’s degree thesis about how to modify strategic planning to better fit the modern, nonprofit museum environment. Rather than exclusively crafting a project-based strategic plan, Bridget posited that her process, the Adaptive Impact Plan, would better serve nonprofits in rapidly changing fields. After leaving Americans for the Arts, Bridget formed her own firm, Galaxy Brain Design, through which she provides design, branding, and strategic planning services.