Marin’s Lily Cline Wins Coveted Music Award

SAN ANSELMO, CA — A project that seemed to be going nowhere helped Lily Cline find a sense of belonging.

It eventually led to the San Domenico School senior winning a prestigious national songwriting award.

Cline was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts as a 2021 Musical Theater Songwriting Challenge award winner.

She was among 13 high school students selected by the NEA judges from a pool of nearly 150 applicants from 32 states.

Cline composed and performed the song “Ganbare” (which means “hard work” in Japanese) in the San Anselmo school’s student-run musical film, “Forgotten Voices.”

“This win not only validated the hard work and heart I put into this piece, but also that Asian American stories mattered, that mixed race stories mattered, that my story mattered,” Cline said in a statement.

It initially wasn’t clear to Cline that her story mattered much.

“When we first started researching storylines, the eventual goal was to base characters off of the history of the land of Marin County. This made me a little nervous: as a mixed race Asian American, I did not think that I had a place in my home’s history,” she said.

“Growing up, I had never seen myself represented in theater, film, books, or even my own classroom.”

And as she continued her research, Cline hit a wall.

Marin is among the Bay Area’s least diverse counties. According the 2020 U.S. Census, 85.3 percent of Marin residents are white, and just 6.6 percent Asian.

“It turned out that multiracial people could not document themselves as more than one race as such until the census of 2000, meaning it was virtually impossible to find them in historical documents,” Cline said.

Her persistence paid off.

“After going down many a rabbit hole into research papers about interracial marriages in 19th century California, I found the true story of a San Francisco-based, Chinese-Japanese-White family,” she said.

That family would serve as the basis for “Forgotten Voices.”

“I brought a lot of myself into this character: a seventeen year old Japanese-American young woman struggling to find her place in the world,” Cline said.

“Ganbare,” her character’s song, “was a fusion of my own story with hers, and an exploration of songwriting.”

On a whim, she entered the song to the National Musical Theater Songwriting Challenge.

“We have all watched Lily develop her skills at San Domenico, and could not be more proud!” Erica Smith, the school’s director of dance and theater arts, said in a statement.

“GO LILY!”

The Songwriting Challenge provides selected student winners with their own coaching team consisting of a mentor and music director (both musical theater professionals) to hone an original song into a Broadway-ready composition and then have that song recorded by Broadway musicians and vocalists in New York City.

The final songs will be combined into an album that will be featured in an iHeartRadio Broadway matinee.

The album will be distributed on streaming music platforms and compiled into a songbook created by Concord Theatricals.

Cline credits Smith and San Domenico theater arts instructor Jen Grimes for providing the inspiration to submit her work for consideration for the prestigious award, and guest composer Phil Schroeder for helping her produce the song.

“I know that I never would have gotten here without them,” Cline said. “Phil Schroeder especially, for arranging the piece.”

"Forgotten Voices" will be shown at San Domenico Friday at 7 p.m. For more information or to purchase tickets visit here.