Alexis Lamb

Alexis Lamb is a master’s student in Music Composition at Yale’s School of Music. 

Her WFF Seed Grant project, “Music and Archival Research Connect in New Work for String Quartet,” is a continued exploration of composition and archival research from a collection entitled Oral Histories Documenting Yale University Women in Yale’s Manuscript and Archives.  Lamb composed a piece for orchestra, “She Was There, Too,” that featured the voices of six women who were in faculty or staff positions during and shortly after Yale College became coeducational in 1969. These women include: Penny Abell, Marie Borroff, Margaret Farley, Florence Haseltine, Maureen Quilligan, and Dorothy Singer. Lamb’s goal was to honor the contributions of these women to the Yale community and celebrate their tremendous impact on Yale’s graduate schools over the last 150 years of women at the University.  In the future, she hopes to incorporate her WFF-sponsored research into a new composition for string quartet. 

The Yale Philharmonia premiered “She Was There, Too” on December 12, 2019, in Woolsey Hall.  To learn more about Lamb’s research and her composition process, please listen to her podcast.