Content note: This episode briefly touches on suicidal ideation and sexual assault.
On today's episode of music/Maker with Tyler Kline, Tyler is joined by composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Lillian Yee.
San Francisco Bay Area-based Lillian Yee (余慧森) has built a creative practice that resists easy categorization. Her music has been performed internationally across Australia, Finland, Germany, and Canada, and throughout the United States — most notably Miracles of the Human Condition for brass quintet, commissioned by a consortium of seven quintets and performed by Axiom Brass, Calliope Brass, and Seraph Brass, among others. She composes in classical and contemporary idioms while also performing across jazz, Brazilian, and world music traditions, co-founded the Women Composers Collective, and is currently completing her training as a Certified Music Practitioner — someone who delivers live, improvised therapeutic music to patients in clinical settings. Her first LP as a singer-songwriter is due in 2026.
In this conversation, Lillian and Tyler trace a path that begins with her grandmother's Buddhist chanting and a first piece composed at the piano and recorded onto a cassette Walkman, moves through elaborate Sheena Ringo arrangements for school diversity days, the institutional frustrations of studying composition formally, and a deliberate turn away from academia toward indie rock bands and Brazilian music — and arrives at a practice where composing, performing, healing, and community-building are all expressions of the same thing. They talk about what it means to make music as medicine rather than as performance, what a highly sensitive nervous system has to teach a composer about sound and empathy, how Lillian got to the other side of a crisis in 2019 and what she found there, and why she believes making art is the ultimate form of love.
Learn more about Lillian and hear her work at https://www.lillianyee.com/
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