Leading by Example: Alysia Lee on "Say Her Name"

Alysia Lee and I both live in Baltimore, MD, and, frankly, I’m devastated that the pandemic made an in-person interview impossible, because after our conversation I want to buy her coffee and talk about whatever she’s thinking about. 

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.

Her original composition, Say Her Name, premiered in November 2020, performed by the University of Michigan choir. The piece was written as a vehicle to bring the powerful Kwanzaa ceremony to the concert stage with a call to action. 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

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

Bridget Woodbury | Director of Community Engagement, Creative Generation: I saw the recording of the Say Her Name premiere and I’d love to start with the background of that piece. Can you tell us how you started developing it?

Alysia Lee | Singer, Composer, Arts Educator, and Arts Advocate: I was talking about how we don't see a lot of pieces that really represent ideas that would come from Black and Brown children’s minds and, I mean, there's not a lot of culturally responsive choir repertoire and my friend said, “well, you're a musician. You went to school. Can't you write the songs?”

So I started really diving into thinking about education in a new way and thinking about the way that creativity plays a role in educational spaces and I started to develop some new ideas around when creativity is not present.

When kids are recreating experiences, they are building museums to people who have passed along. What is the value of that? And there is value in that, but is that an educational experience? It's almost like a Civil War reenactment on a weekend. So it feels more like a recreational experience. [I wanted to create] opportunities for kids to respond and connect with art. And also opportunities for them to create new works that share their ideas.

[As I shared my thoughts with my teaching artists,] these ideas started to kind of permeate our organization. We've developed a strategic goal that by 2020, half of the music that is performed at every concert will be original work. 

[But] how can we ask people to do things that we don't do ourselves? I've always, you know, composed Melodies. I didn't think of that as composition at the time, right? And also, I've also always written songs, too, that are just for the choir to sing, things like that. But this year again was the year to branch out and be a little more vulnerable, learn some new things, compose pieces — and so I composed Say Her Name this summer. And I composed it as a song for solo voice and then we've done some arranging to it, to make it so that it's available for choirs. I always envisioned that the kids and I would sing it together.

And I closed out the conference with a sing-along. I offered this song as one of the songs and there were lots of quiet people listening, and the piece was published this summer. It's a part of the Exigence Series, which is a choir series. It's really looking at basically music from the diaspora, contemporary music from the diaspora, that has Black or Brown composers, but also that has Black and Brown musical influence. So that's why the piece has been heard, right? Because I would have written it and then just kept it to myself and me and my friends. Yeah, but [the fact that] the other piece has been heard is this impetus to be a model for the fact that so many of us have lots to say and we have deep feelings and thoughts and we've been told that our voices are not the voice that gets to share those thoughts, that we are the people who recreate others. And so I think it's important to put out for people, especially [people] from communities that we don't see — so basically anyone except a white male. It's important that we begin to think, not just about performing, but about composing and expressing ourselves to music and sharing our stories to music. And so that's that's a piece of what Say Her Name is about.

Bridget: I would be interested to hear a little bit more about what you were saying about some influences from the diaspora. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

Alysia: So, yeah, the piece itself has — I'm just thinking through from the beginning — there's this this jump right up [she sings] which recently, even in The Color Purple, when Nettie and Celie are being separated and she calls back to her and says “Nettie,”  it's so similar, but that wailing sound is a sound that I've heard at Black funerals many times, you know? Culturally, Black funerals are different, and Latinx funerals, and Asian funerals — Chinese families have different kinds of funerals than Japanese families, right? We all have different cultural traditions and Black traditions [include] certain sounds that you hear at the funeral and that sound is one of them — also the curvature of the notes with the name. It is very, very West African on that guttural sound forward on the downward slide. We also [use] vocal percussion and that reinforces this idea of a chain gang.

There's a call and response. There is a layering. The ceremony itself — which is what we call the section of the piece where the names are spoken — invited folks to not only bring in the body percussion, but it also invites improvisation which is, of course, you know, Black music invites folks to improvise. 

There's the other part of the ceremony: the saying of the names is a cultural tradition — in my family, we celebrate our ancestors frequently at every gathering and we do libation ceremonies where we pour water over living things and we say the names of those who have gone before us and we see that tradition coming from ancient times and coming from West Africa. So people laugh at people when they pour 40s out for their homies, right? But that is an ancient tradition that those folks were holding onto — we sometimes don't know where our traditions originate, as black Americans. 

So these ancient traditions are a part of that piece — the calling of the names, some of those musical components, and of course the piece itself since it’s a piece of music that is meant to inspire conversation and dialogue. It's a piece of music that's meant to inspire action and it's meant to inspire questions and discussions. So those are those components. 

Bridget: It's such a striking piece. I think, in part, because they're, you know, not sounds we hear that often in pop culture. Definitely the first time I watched the video I was like, ‘oh man, I don't know if I've ever listened to anything quite like this,’ but you can really feel it. The performance that I saw, I think, was the Michigan performance. Did you work directly with their students?

Alysia: Those are University of Michigan students. So there were a couple choirs there. There's 300 singers and Dr. Eugene Rogers, the head of choir at University of Michigan. Those are his students, so they premiered the piece which was really lovely. They got to have the first virtual piece. The was supposed to be performed — it's even printed in the sheet music — for ACDA 2021. So Dr. Rogers was like, okay, then, not ACDA, that’s not occurring, but let’s premiere this earlier.

There are going to be a few more virtual performances that are rolling out between now and February, and in most of the cases the choirs have contacted me to kind of talk through their ideas and they're all so different, which is really cool. I've been doing some rehearsal visits and conducting workshops or just meeting with artistic directors. It’s so important that the same kind of attention and study in detail that we give to, let's say, a Mozart Requiem or a Carmina Burana, we give to this piece, right? So like every name that is spoken in the piece every singer in the choir should know the story of that name — and they should do their own research, like the choir conductor should not present it, with the exception of youth choirs just because some of the stories are graphic and so you want to edit them. But for adults, it's like these are the names you go and find the stories, you go and figure out what happened to them. So that kind of preparation is embedded. For instance, Portland Lesbian Choir is doing the premiere of the Say Her Name version, because, Michigan was an SATB version and so —  it's Portland, right? They've been in the news recently for violence that was racial justice focused. So Portland has a different story than Michigan and they are reflecting that in their video, which is really lovely and I can't wait for people to see that and that's important, too. 

Bridget: I think that's going to be a really interesting 

Alysia: So I went to a rehearsal and met with their singers, then I had a lengthy meeting with their video director. They really want to incorporate how this movement has impacted their city. That is great. And it's also, of course, opened up lots of dialogue in the choir. They can have direct dialogue about the themes of the piece. So that's I think also very encouraging.

Because sometimes we feel [like we can’t have that conversation] in these artistic spaces and people should know like black people are suffering when that occurs. Like, when we ignore what we know is happening in the real world because we're in a choir rehearsal and we don't talk about it people do suffer. Right? So yeah, this makes space for people to have open dialogue and talk about their experiences with each other.

Stay tuned for Part 2, which will be shared on the Creative Generation blog next week.