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beyonce age

FoxJuliedde Kasım 20, 2021

beyonce age

What 7-Year-Old Blue Ivy Carter's Life With Beyoncé Is Like - ELLE.com

Posted: 24 Jul 2019 06:12 AM PDT

Blue Ivy Carter, the real breakout star on her mother Beyoncé's The Lion King: The Gift album, has a big personality and a lot of star power at age seven, People is reporting. The outlet got some rare details about what Blue is like and how her day-to-days are with her mom and dad Jay-Z.

Blue is set to enter second grade at a private school in Los Angeles this fall, the outlet's source said. She's also really close to Beyoncé and loves spending one-on-one time with her mother. "She is very sassy, high energy and knows what she wants," a source told the outlet. "Especially after the twins [two-year-olds Sir and Rumi] were born, Beyoncé made sure that Blue was able to embrace her new role as a big sister. She also lets her go to video shoots, award shows and music recording. They have a very special bond!"

Blue is drawn to and naturally gifted in the arts, the source added. "Of course both Beyoncé and Blue love music. Blue loves singing, dancing and performing. She is a natural."

The outlet was also told that as dedicated as Beyoncé is to her work, she's more dedicated to her kids Blue, Sir, and Rumi. "It might seem like her career would take up all her time, but it's quite the opposite," the source said. "Her career is always second and her kids are her first priority. She is a fantastic mom and very involved."

Sir and Rumi haven't walked any red carpets with their mom yet (they are only toddlers, after all), but Blue attended the Los Angeles The Lion King premiere with her mother earlier this month.

Beyoncé Lion King album: The young Brit who wrote the first track - BBC News

Posted: 22 Jul 2019 02:50 AM PDT

RayeImage copyright Getty Images

When she was 16, singer Raye told herself she was going to work with Beyoncé.

As ambitions go, it's similar to a child making a rocket out of loo rolls and telling themselves they're going to the moon one day.

But just five years later, Raye has done it - having co-written Bigger, the first track on Beyoncé's new Lion King album The Gift.

"It's absolutely crazy how things have turned out," she tells Newsbeat.

Raye's scored solo hits and written big songs for people like Ellie Goulding, David Guetta, Little Mix and more.

But having a cut on a Beyoncé record is arguably her biggest song-writing credit yet.

"Everyone in my age bracket grew up listening to her religiously.

"I studied Beyoncé and all of her performances, I used to watch her videos crying."

Image copyright Getty Images
Image caption Beyoncé and Jay Z attended the European premiere of The Lion King in London in July

The song was penned at a writing camp at Beyoncé's studio - which is where songwriters and producers all work together over a short period of time to come up with songs for a major new project.

Six people are credited with writing Bigger - including Beyoncé - but Raye says the song began life due to a bond with US songwriter Stacy Barthe.

Bigger was written in a 'dark, sad place'

"I remember we were both in a really dark, sad place and we wanted to create something to empower ourselves," says Raye.

"We spent maybe two or three hours on it. It was 3am and I remember Beyoncé's team came in and heard what we'd created so far and just completely freaked out. It was incredible."

But while Raye knew Beyoncé and her team liked Bigger, she didn't find out the song had made the album until a few days before the record was released.

"There were hundreds of songs and you never know. So it was a real moment to hear it was going to be track one and that she's done a video for it."

And while Raye says she kept her composure in front of Beyoncé, while she was working with the star, she admits she was "completely losing it".

Since coming to attention in the UK with Jax Jones and Jonas Blue collaborations in 2016, Raye's become an in-demand vocalist, writer and hit-maker in her own right.

When we spoke to Raye, she was chatting by a pool at David Guetta's studio in Ibiza.

But she says having a credit on a Beyoncé song is validation for several years of hard work in the music industry.

"I want to be taken seriously as a writer," she says.

"It took a lot of work to find my way into the writing rooms, then the bigger rooms, to eventually get into a room like this. Then to actually have a cut, it's just crazy, I'm over the moon."

Beyoncé & Blue Ivy Collaborated On 'Brown Skin Girl' From the 'Lion King' Album - SheKnows

Posted: 19 Jul 2019 02:39 PM PDT

As Beyoncé's daughter, it's only fair that 7-year-old Blue Ivy Carter would have an outsize musical ability — even for her very young age. But as today's album release revealed Beyoncé and Blue Ivy's collaboration on "Brown Skin Girl" from the Lion King soundtrack, one thing became very clear: we underestimated what Blue Ivy was bringing to the table. Twitter's response to the album release, and Blue Ivy's performance in particular, has been swift and reverent, confirming that the Carters' next generation is likely to be as powerful as Beyoncé and Jay-Z ever were. Look out world — there's a new talent on the loose.

Fans were impressed with everything about Blue Ivy's appearance on the album: the fact that she has a writing credit and is listed as a featured artist on a major album for a Disney movie is impressive enough, as many noted. Then there's the song itself, "Brown Skin Girl," which is resonating with many women of color as a "love letter." Finally, there's sheer awe at her singing ability: "how can blue ivy sing better than most of the music industry at the age of 7," one tweet reads. The lyrics she sings go like this: "Brown skin girl. Your skin just like pearls. The best thing in the world. Never trade for anybody else."

Here's what people had to say about this young musical phenomenon — starting with the outright praise and adulation.

Others got emotional about the content of the lyrics — "the way they're teaching her to love herself and her culture is beyond beautiful," one tweet reads.

In addition to gushing over Blue Ivy's talent and the message of the song, some fans pointed out just how well the song is doing.

Not bad, Blue Ivy! If this was her first venture into singing and songwriting, we're almost afraid of how good her second track will be. Here's to another Carter queen!

Beyonce's 'The Gift' Album is Out Now, Stream It Here - Highsnobiety

Posted: 19 Jul 2019 03:25 AM PDT

Last week Beyoncé nonchalantly announced she had curated and produced an accompanying album to Disney's The Lion King like it's no big deal. And, well, Bey just delivered. The Lion King: The Gift is finally here and it's the sonic cinema of our dreams.

The album, out today, features contributions from a dazzling cast of collaborators, including JAY-Z, Blue Ivy Carter, Childish Gambino, Kendrick Lamar, Pharrell, and others. Referred to as a "love letter to Africa," the record also boasts multiple African artists, such as Wizkid, Mr Eazi, Tekno, and Burna Boy.

Behind the scenes, the album is just as impressive. The Gift features production from Diplo, Syd and Sounwave — who worked on Kendrick Lamar's DAMN. DJ Khaled is listed as a producer on the track "MOOD 4 EVA," a collaboration between Beyoncé, JAY-Z, and Childish Gambino.

"I wanted to put everyone on their own journey to link the storyline," Beyoncé said in a press release. "Each song was written to reflect the film's storytelling that gives the listener a chance to imagine their own imagery, while listening to a new contemporary interpretation." The album maintains a strong link to the Jon Favreau-directed film and is interspersed with interludes carrying dialogue from the characters. James Earl Jones, who voices Mufasa, opens the album.

Earlier this month, Beyoncé (who voices Nala) released the first single from the project, "Spirit" with an accompanying dramatic video. You can now stream the full album below.

On this week's episode of The Dropcast, we are joined by photographer Cam Hicks and Angelo Urrutia, your favorite influencer's favorite influencer's favorite behind-the-scenes creative director. Enjoy.

Beyonce's 'The Lion King: The Gift' Review: Polishes Her Legacy - UPROXX

Posted: 22 Jul 2019 08:00 AM PDT

New music from Beyonce has become synonymous with a cultural moment, which is why the last two releases from the global star have been big news, even if neither qualified as an out-and-out album. If last year's joint album with her admonished-but-forgiven husband Jay-Z was an act of devotion to her marriage, this year's companion album to the remake of The Lion King is her first musical act of motherhood. Even if Blue Ivy didn't appear prominently in the double videos that Bey released to accompany two of her tracks for the film, "Spirit" and "Bigger" respectively, it's hard for me not to note that Blue is currently a seven-year-old, right around the age I was when the original film was released.

The Lion King was the first movie I saw in a proper movie theater. At six, just the experience of finally going to a movie was overwhelming enough, but the movie itself became an instant favorite, too. I learned all the songs from the film, gleefully belting them out for days and weeks later, and looked for anything that might've come out in conjunction with the film. For me and plenty of other kids born into the oft-mocked millennial generation, it was one of those era-defining films: a window into the ecosystems of animals, into a different place than the one I lived in, into relationships and family dynamics, and into even the scariest subject of all — the death of a parent.

Regardless of how the film fares critically, it covers a lot of ground that's important in the development of any kid, but takes on special meaning for one of the most prominent Black mothers in the world. Beyonce's decision to support a film that centers the Black experience and shines a light on the film's decidedly African story, a facet that was played down in the animated version, is another act that marries the personal and political. And even if there were blind spots in the album's production — no artists from the region highlighted in the film's fictional storyline were included, for instance — Beyonce's focus on legacy, and how her children will live in a world defined by her own is a throughline in the pan-African body of music she has created, curated, and executive produced.

Opening up with a meditation on this subject, "Bigger," which coincides with the themes of the film — "I'll be the roots, you be the tree / Pass on the fruit that was given to me / Legacy, we're part of something way bigger" — the song also finds Beyonce in reflective mode, as though she's finally giving herself some room to breathe.

Real Life Rock Top 10: Colson Whitehead, Pere Ubu, Beyonce - Rolling Stone

Posted: 24 Jul 2019 10:06 AM PDT

1. Aisha Harris, "Lion Queen (Beyoncé) Has Her Say," New York Times (July 20). New Horizons in Democratic Theory Dep't: "To hear Beyoncé speak is such a rare occurrence that any instance of it, no matter how fleeting, feels special, like catching a glimpse of a shooting star."

2. Bruce Springsteen, Western Stars (Columbia). Battle of the Bands: Harry Nilsson v. Glen Campbell. On the record, it's a draw, and really, who cares? Off the record, the world is smaller without Glen Campbell. It isn't without Nilsson. And it isn't bigger with this.

3. Pere Ubu, The Long Goodbye (Cherry Red). With bandleader, singer, and writer David Thomas looking at death, he went back to 1975 and Pere Ubu's first song, "Heart of Darkness," inspired not by Joseph Conrad—Thomas has always loved putting classic titles (as here "Fortunate Son") on songs that have nothing to do with what they're supposedly referring to—but by Raymond Chandler. For what he expected would be his own long goodbye, as if his whole life had been a kind of farewell, Thomas chose the title of Chandler's 1953 novel, itself a kind of rewrite of The Great Gatsby, which as a detective story has more corpses than Chandler's The Long Goodbye. And this time the title is not a false clue: putting a generic noir image on the album cover, Thomas digs down, inhabiting Philip Marlowe, looking for the streets he walked.

Thomas composed the songs, set them to music with synthesizers and drum machines, and sent the tracks to the rest of the band. The result is on the first disc here, which is not quite there. It's all there on the second disc, a live performance of the album from Montreuil, just outside of Paris. Beginning with "Heart of Darkness," moving with jumps and stalls through "Flicking Cigarettes at the Sun," "Marlowe," "Skidrow-on-Sea," the band is severe and brittle, with Thomas, in his cracker-barrel philosopher mode, explaining the music: his favorite movie Marlowe is Robert Mitchum, he says, but the song he's going to play next is based on Elliott Gould's Marlowe in Robert Altman's version of The Long Goodbye . . .  It's game, a great circle of a band's story, which might have made its best album.

4. National Delivery, A Plurality of One: The Song of Walt Whitman, a dramatic presentation written and staged by Joe Christiano, with sound ambiance by Justin J. Jones, Timbre Folk and Baroque (Berkeley, July 20, with a reprise August 3). Before a semi-circle of twenty-three in a stringed instrument space, Stanley Spenger strolled in as Whitman's ghost, dressed in rough-looking clothes—he hasn't slept since 1892—and a broad-brimmed leather hat, remarking that he was on leave from his usual haunts in any given branch of the New York Public Library. Soon enough in the hour-long production he was orchestrating "Song of Myself"—"Not all of it"—and instantly, it rang. Throwing out lines for people to shout back either together, or, with a pointing Whitman finger, any given person on their own, the poem began to echo over the whole of the American discourse that Whitman was calling up and that, since he wrote, has called up him. You could hear that the opening of the poem was purposefully following the cadence of the beginning of the Declaration of Independence ("We hold these truths to be self-evident" . . . "You shall assume what I assume"). As the poem stepped toward its last lines with "Look for me under your boot-soles" you could hear Tom Joad's testimony as he disappears from The Grapes of Wrath ("Then I'll be all aroun' in the dark. I'll be ever-where—wherever you look"). In Whitman's "The kept-woman and sponger and thief are hereby invited" you could hear the witnessing in Bruce Springsteen's revision of "Gospel Train" in "Land of Hope and Dreams": "This train carries whores and gamblers," which, presumably, Spenger's Whitman, checking out Wrecking Ball at the Williamsburgh Library on Divison Avenue in Brooklyn, had already heard.

5. Rails, Cancel the Sun (Thirty Tigers). Two musicians flailing about, except when Kami Thompson does an ethereal float through "Save the Planet," a punk song disguised as a soft, comforting ballad: "No one likes you, and you know why . . . Save the planet, kill yourself."

6. Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys (Doubleday). It takes nerve, or a blunt disregard for what the world expects, to follow the hugely honored best-seller The Underground Railroad with a small-sized novel of barely 200 pages and not a lot more than half as many words as the supposed game changer. Small novels don't sell like big novels, because they seem small—too small to carry the weight of the world. But despite a story that posited a somehow completely believable real, actual underground railroad, with real stations, real conductors, and tunnels worthy of John Henry, and accounts of slavery and racism so brutal, so true to history, and so starkly, poetically written they can be as hard to read as Kara Walker's silhouettes can be to look at, The Underground Railroad, which did everything it could to escape the escaped-slave and slave-catcher genre, remained a genre novel. There was a way in which you had read it before.

The Nickel Boys, following two boys in their late teens, Elwood Curtis and Turner, in the Nickel Academy, a segregated boys' reformatory in Florida in 1963 and 1964, is not a genre novel. There is nothing in it that is mandated by its form, because it doesn't inhabit one. There is nothing predictable. The sense of jeopardy is like a curse, and the most foreboding moments are those in which Whitehead lets both his characters and the reader relax, lets them and you almost off the hook, where for at least a moment they and you can forget what has already happened and what might come next.

At Nickel, boys who don't know how to get along are beaten and whipped. Those who engage in some small, even semiconscious refusal, like failing to throw a fight that is supposed to be fixed, are tortured and starved, and then executed: "Sometimes they take you to the White House," second-timer Turner tells the green Elwood, "and we never see your ass again."

Eight years after Brown v. Board of Education, in his segregated high school in Tallahassee, with textbooks discarded by white schools and defaced with racist taunts by the white students when their new ones arrive, Elwood is studious, hard-working, breaking no rules. Whitehead could have called the book "The Sixties Without Music": while there are snatches of Chuck Berry and Elvis and the theme song from The Andy Griffith Show from radios in the Nickel infirmary or a Nickel van, Turner picking up each as a whistle, the only album Elwood's grandmother, who has raised him, will allow him is Martin Luther King at Zion Hill, which he finds as inspirational, as soul-filling, as Life magazine: "He knew Frenchtown's piece of the Negro's struggle, where his neighborhood ended and white law took over. Life's photo essays conveyed him to the front lines, to bus boycotts in Baton Rouge, to counter sit-ins in Greensboro, where young people not much older than him took up the movement. They were beaten with metal bars, blasted by fire hoses, spat on by white housewives with angry faces, and frozen by the camera in tableaus of noble resistance. The tiny details were a wonder: how the young men's ties remained straight black arrows in the whirl of violence, how the curves of the young women's perfect hairdos floated against the squares of their protest signs. Glamorous somehow, even when the blood flowed down their faces." [22] Whitehead's reach back to magazines published before he was born is its own wonder: his homing in on those tiny details, bringing them into the present like shaming ghosts.

Elwood is in Nickel because, hitch-hiking to special classes at a nearby college, he caught a ride in a stolen car, which got him charged with car theft. Turner is full of rage, his talk is rough compared to his new friend's, but he's if anything more thoughtful, more attuned to what he doesn't know, because unlike Elwood he doesn't believe there are answers to every question. When you begin to feel that one of the two may not survive the story, you try to worry Turner out of it.

The variety of the books that sound through The Nickel Boys testifies to how and why, like Whitehead's first three novels, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, and the Apex Hides the Hurt, which in just over two hundred pages is as ambitious as Moby Dick and as precise as The Scarlet Letter—and unlike his next two, the coming-of-age Sag Harbor and the zombie-killer thriller Zone One—is a thing in itself. There are the Hardy Boys books, which make Elwood a reader. Even before the fight scene in The Nickel Boys you may have already thought of Ralph Ellison's 1952 Invisible Man, which Elwood wouldn't have read yet—and echoing just as strongly are books Whitehead himself may not have read, though given the research that went into John Henry Days, where it seems impossible that there is anything in the realm of fact or myth about John Henry that Whitehead hasn't read twice he almost certainly has: Haywood Patterson's devastating 1950 Scottsboro Boy, and beyond that Robert Elliott Burns's 1932 I Was a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang. Beyond that there is Tom Sawyer, Detective and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The Nickel Boys has part of all of them in it while being not like any of them.

Mitchell Dylan Baez Havens. Musicians Roger McGuinn, Joni Mitchell, Richi Havens, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan perform the finale of the The Rolling Thunder Revue, a tour headed by Dylan. Martin Scorsese's latest film, "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story By Martin Scorsese," is a blistering semi-fictional documentary that resurrects Dylan's mythic 1975-1976 tour and its rambling cavalcade across a post-Vietnam America. The film, which opens Wednesday in limited theaters and on Netflix, includes restored performance footage, scenes of the backstage circus and interviews with many of the participants, including Dylan's first on-camera interview in 10 yearsFilm Martin Scorsese - 01 Dec 1975

Musicians Roger McGuinn, Joni Mitchell, Richi Havens, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan perform the finale of the The Rolling Thunder Revue, a tour headed by Dylan. Photo credit: AP/Shutterstock

7. & 8. Bob Dylan, "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" & "This Land Is Your Land," Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings (November 19, 20, 21, two shows, December 4, Columbia). Over 16 CDs, along with rehearsals and songs not often performed, the shows collected here are standard: in the first set "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" comes third, in the second "This Land Is Your Land" comes last, and without variation and a doggedly uninspired band—with the exception of Scarlet Rivera on violin, the faceless musicians back Dylan, but they don't play the songs—I found myself waiting for those to come around.

Hearing "Hattie Carroll" again and again, you realize it could be Bob Dylan's best-written song, and structurally his most original, with all the different parts—the direct opening line of each verse, then the music opening up for a detailed narrative, then the chorus undermining what you've just heard and speeding you into the next verse—speaking a different language, almost becoming a different language. In the last performance, at the Forum in Montreal, you feel that in every previous attempt Dylan has been holding back: here there is a rush, a desperation, behind every syllable, each one building up to an intensity that throws the reality of the story Dylan is telling, and the art with which he's telling it, straight in your face. It suggests that one direction Dylan's bootleg series could take would be discs of versions of songs Dylan has performed from the beginning of his career on, in different times, settings, election nights: "Masters of War," "Blowin' in the Wind," "Young But Daily Growing," "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll."

"This Land Is Your Land" is interesting because it's absolutely horrible. It's a hoedown with big names each taking a verse—Jack Elliot! Roger McGuinn! Bob Neuwirth! Joan Baez! Joni Mitchell!—and if you've ever wondered what hell is like, it's Joan and Joanie singing this song as if it's opera and they're opera singers, night after night. Glen Campbell used the same arrangement in his TV show a few years later, duetting with Andy Williams. It was better. "This Land Is Your Land" was written buy Woody Guthrie as an answer to Kate Smith's pompositous rendition of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America." That was better.

9. Diane (IFC), written and directed by Kent Jones. Set in decaying rural Massachusetts with snow on the ground and Mary Kay Place's Diane in every scene, this is a movie about aging, death, addiction, poverty, religion, and bad food. Especially bad food: the people in this story live lives without pleasure. The most spectacular event shown is an argument at a dinner table; repeatedly, you see Place and others serve food to the homeless and indigent in a church basement. You can't look away from anything. In a performance that echoes Robert Duvall in Tomorrow in 1972 and Melissa Leo in Frozen River in 2008, across an hour and thirty-five minutes Place's expression barely seems to change, and so it's the moments when it does, or almost does, that might stay with you. Place sits stone-faced in a holiness church while everyone around her is in a trance of deliverance; in the kind of bar where they never take down the Christmas lights, she drinks herself into a resolute oblivion, dancing at the jukebox to Bob Dylan's "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here with You," which in this setting sounds trashier than Leon Russell's "Out in the Woods"; in a displacement of her own son's addiction that seems at once a willed nightmare and everyday life at its limit, she goes to see a man to get shot up with heroin, for the first time, in her seventies, maybe the last time, maybe not, and here, most strikingly, her expression does change. A whisper of a smile crosses her face as the man plunges the needle; it's as if she's gone to see a priest to confess and without saying a word leaves feeling blessed.

10. Mekons, Music Hall of Williamsburg (Brooklyn, July 19). Shannon McArdle, late of the Mendoza Line, writes in: "Sally Timms's brown purse plunked in front of Steve Goulding's kick drum, a harbinger that she, the bag, and the remaining seven Mekons would be coming and going a few times during the two-plus hour affair. There was warm teasing and loving surrender in Jon Langford's oral interludes. Just before a more rocking, still reggae version of 'Tina,' he acquiesced: 'Even the setlist has arthritis!' Expression of such feebleness has long been there, far before the members themselves confessed to any of the personal physical manifestations of it.

"When Sally sang 'I Love a Millionaire,' the mordant, mournful tone–a woman mourning herself and the world, too—'Dreaming of a creature who is too pale and large to stand and only feels the terror of his vain flight from earth'—the words portended a sickness where they stood now that the band dared to imagine over twenty-five years ago. Tom Greenhalgh presented a more personal exploration of what plagues us currently, collectively. 'Father, father, dig my grave, for I am pickled, I am done / Upon my hand, a velvet glove to show them all I died for love,' he implored, studying his open hand in the air, not one star in sight."

Why Beyoncé Is a Fan of These Teenage Singers From Brooklyn - The New York Times

Posted: 20 Jul 2019 12:00 AM PDT

[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]

"Is Beyoncé Knowles the Beyoncé?"

Dianne Berkun Menaker, the founder and artistic director of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, was referring to an email, apparently from Ms. Knowles, during a staff meeting in 2018 at the organization's headquarters in Cobble Hill. The email was requesting to license a piece her choir had recorded with Caroline Shaw, a 2013 Pulitzer Prize winner for Music, which would be featured in an upcoming tour with her husband Jay-Z.

"I don't think I own a Beyoncé album, so the whole thing to me was really funny," Ms. Berkun Menaker said, recalling the story in May from her office.

The Beyoncé request probably should not have been surprising to anyone at the conference table that day — nor to the hundreds of young singers, mostly between the ages of 11 and 18, who make up the current Brooklyn Youth Chorus. For many contemporary musicians looking to collaborate, the group has become a popular resource.

In the past year alone, chorus members have seen their work used by Louis Vuitton and Pharrell for a Chanel ad campaign; performed with David Byrne and countless other major artists across all genres; worked with several rock bands like the National and Bon Iver; and released a new record, featuring Ms. Shaw and other indie rock luminaries, all while going to school most of the day.

Image
CreditDemetrius Freeman for The New York Times

"You can't be a procrastinator and be in B.Y.C.," Thalia Glyptis, 15, said. "It just doesn't work." The group rehearses three times a week for a combined seven hours minimum, she said. "Having such a big chunk of your time going toward something else gives you a lot of understanding of how to use your time to the best of your abilities, which helped me in school."

In 1992, Ms. Berkun Menaker established Brooklyn Youth Chorus as more of a community-based organization rather than a typical school choir. She knew the program would demand a lot from the singers but wouldn't be a financial burden on their families.

"In my experiences traveling to choral conventions and such, in most cases, no matter what the population or how diverse the population," Ms. Berkun Menaker said, "the elite choruses that were coming out of these cities never represented the actual communities." This disturbed her, she said. "It felt really important that we be representative and inclusive."

Ms. Berkun Menaker uses a trademarked technique that teaches young singers how to make physical adjustments to sound authentic across a wide range of genres and styles. Called Cross-Choral Training, it prepares her singers to tackle classical masterworks and pop songs alike. But the group has also embraced secular music and pieces not typically performed by high school choirs.

CreditDemetrius Freeman for The New York Times

A decade after the chorus got its start, it performed alongside John Adams and the New York Philharmonic with "On the Transmigration of Souls" in 2002. The recording of the piece won the Grammy Award for best classical album in 2005. The year before, the chorus had performed with Elton John, at Radio City Music Hall.

Around this time, the collaborations began to snowball: an appearance on "Sesame Street" with Alicia Keys here, backing vocals on an album by the rock band, Grizzly Bear, there.

Chorus members took the star-studded collaborations in stride, and continue to do so today, said Maya Renaud-Levine, 16. "As much as we try not to be the fangirls, I think the artists also really make an effort to respect us as fellow artists, and that's really what it feels like," Ms. Renaud-Levine continued. "It feels like a collaboration as opposed to them doing us a favor or us looking up to them all the time. It feels like being respected on an equal playing field."

CreditDemetrius Freeman for The New York Times

In 2000, Ms. Berkun Menaker began commissioning pieces to outside composers. By the end of the decade, 13 different artists had written work specifically for the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, a number that has since swelled to 50.

A result of this effort, "Tour Eiffel," a complex choral arrangement composed by Bryce Dessner, who plays multiple instruments for the National, and featuring the chorus, had its premiere at St. Ann's Warehouse, in Brooklyn, in 2011. "Tour Eiffel" became one of the chorus's signature pieces, beginning a lengthy collaboration that continues to this day.

In 2014, the choir presented an evening-length work curated by Mr. Dessner, "Black Mountain Songs," at the BAM Harvey Theater as part of the Next Wave Festival. Working with accomplished composers like Nico Muhly and Caroline Shaw, as well as the guitarist Richard Reed Parry from the rock band Arcade Fire, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus went on to record "Black Mountain Songs" in 2017. It was the group's first commercial release.

CreditDemetrius Freeman for The New York Times

Most recently, the choir, featured on the National's new album, "I Am Easy to Find," performed alongside the band at its recent Celebrate Brooklyn! shows in Prospect Park, as well as on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon," in June.

Though the teenagers of Brooklyn Youth Chorus have been collaborating with some of the biggest names in music — Thom Yorke, John Legend, and Barbra Streisand, to name a few — they have not been daunted by the star wattage. Many of them have become more self-assured in the process.

"I was very shy and my mom thought the best way for my voice to be heard was in a chorus with the support of an entire group," Ms. Glyptis said, just before taking the stage alongside the National at the Celebrate Brooklyn! concert. "She found the Brooklyn Youth Chorus and ever since, I've gained a lot more confidence. I've been able to sometimes sing on my own."

Ms. Renaud-Levine also described herself as "painfully shy," preferring not to speak up in the classroom. "My teacher would talk to my mom and be like, 'You know your daughter knows the answers, but what's going on?' She knew I loved to sing so she also signed me up and it pretty much cured that."

This newfound self-confidence among the choristers frequently crops up in rehearsals with their famous collaborators. Perhaps the best example happened while the singers were working with Mr. Muhly, the composer, on a piece called "Advice to a Young Woman" in November 2016.

The song, inspired by a 300-year-old pamphlet detailing how a woman should behave, plays off the unrealistic rules for women with a satirical eye. The choreography initially had members of the ensemble looking at their cellphones, an idea that many of the singers did not like.

CreditDemetrius Freeman for The New York Times

"It just felt that that choreography was blaming teenagers for being immersed in their cellphones," Ms. Renaud-Levine said. "It was really about how adults impose on these young women and sexualize them and turn them into these people who suddenly have to watch where they look because they're going to attract a man or whatever," she continued. "It felt like almost putting the blame on the child when this was about holding adults accountable. We wanted to see that reflected in the choreography as well."

Sierra Principal, 16, said that since composers are writing material for the chorus, she feels like it's almost expected that the working relationship among them be equal and participatory. "Because we've been through this process so many times, I think we've definitely become more comfortable and we're more open to putting ideas out there," she said.

That confidence affects the musicians too, Ms. Shaw said. "It was a really great collaboration from the beginning," she said. "I think they inspired me to write some of my best music."

Although the chorus members are driven and well trained — alumni include a Met Opera National Council winner and touring jazz artists — they are still children at the end of the day.

"Under Dianne's direction, they're incredibly professional," said David Byrne, who in May performed with the chorus at the National Sawdust Gala in Williamsburg.

"But they turned back into kids at lunch break," he said with a laugh.
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