As Josephine Lee prepared to conduct the elite 100-member concert choir of the Chicago Children’s Choir through “Ave Maria” at Riverside Church in New York City, she felt worn and overwhelmed. It had been a long year.

Her father had passed away, her mother had lost her battle with colon cancer, and two planes had flown into the World Trade Center in New York. Her adolescent singers were rebelling, the staging for the performance was off and, on top of it all, she was sick.

As the singers filed onto the stage, one thought kept circling her mind: “I can’t believe I have to pull this off!”

Everything changed, however, once the choir began singing.

“There was something in that moment,” said Lee. “It was something beyond my power.”

Audience members were moved to tears by the performance. After years of tedious practice, the students finally realized, as they basked in the applause of the audience, the power of their own voices.

That performance, coupled with the traumatic events of the previous year, cemented Lee’s devotion to a job about which she had been uncertain for years.

A native of Chicago, Lee started as artistic director of the Chicago Children’s Choir in 1998 when she was only 22 years old, the youngest ever to hold the position. Newly graduated from Northwestern, where she studied piano and conducting, she was desperate for a job after her mother fell ill.

The multiracial choir, founded in 1956 by the Rev. Christopher Moore in response to the Cicero race riots, has over 3,200 participants from various choirs around the city, but 100 singers tour with Lee as part of the prestigious — and demanding — concert choir. For those elite singers, it can be a life-changing experience. They tour internationally, collaborate with celebrated musicians, and perform for dignitaries, including Bill Clinton, the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela. As artistic director, Lee, 31, not only conducts the choir, but also shapes the artistic goals for the choir and maintains the musical excellence for which the choir is world-renown.

For many years, however, it was just a job, says Lee.

“It’s unusual for someone with her profile and talent to be the artistic director of a children’s choir,” explains Christina Deaton DeMarea, executive director of the choir.

While Lee does occasionally conduct symphonic orchestras on the side, she insists that her calling is with the children’s choir.

Through the discipline, hard work, and perseverance necessary to achieve musical excellence, Lee says she hopes to give her singers the skills that will aid them in the outside world.

“Everyone wants to become famous, right off the bat, with no work ethic, no discipline and no training,” says Lee. “It takes a lot of work to become excellent, to become great. … Practice sucks, but it’s a necessity.”

Lee credits her parents for instilling in her such strong discipline. Lee’s father, a minister, grew up in Pyongyang, North Korea, where he had a wife and kids. He left temporarily for the South before the Korean War, but couldn’t return after the establishment of the 38th parallel. At the urging of friends, he married Lee’s mother, a schoolteacher, in an arranged marriage. Twenty years his wife’s senior, he was 57 when Lee was born.