Ayanna Woods — part of a very musical Chicago family — is taking the classical world by storm

Plenty of composers can call up the moment they first heard their music performed, usually with a smile.

For Ayanna Woods, that smile tips into a cringe. She was in eighth grade and had just arranged “Shadowland” from “The Lion King” musical for her school band, at the now-defunct Ridge Academy in Beverly. One problem: She had no clue notation software existed. Woods spent her independent study periods painstakingly drawing out staff lines, time signatures, keys and notes in Microsoft Paint.

That determination has carried Woods, 31, a long way. Eminent contemporary classical ensembles such as The Crossing, Chanticleer and Chicago’s Third Coast Percussion now clamor to perform her music. The latter recorded her “Triple Point” (2017) on a Grammy-nominated album last year.

But later this week, Woods will see the fruits of one of her longest-germinating projects yet. Over the past four years, she’s been the lead composer and music director of “FORCE!, an opera in three acts,” set in a prison waiting room. The opera will be staged at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago March 28-30 and is rooted in writer/creator Anna Martine Whitehead’s real-life experiences teaching in prisons.

Excerpts from “FORCE!” have been heard elsewhere, in venues ranging from Chicago’s Symphony Center to prisons, but the MCA show presents the opera in its entirety for the first time. As a scan of its creative team makes clear, the process behind “FORCE!” is hugely collaborative — Woods worked alongside fellow Chicago musicians Phillip Armstrong, Angel Bat Dawid and Teiana Davis (who performs as Anaiet Soul) — a mode the self-effacing Woods thrives in.

Taylor Glascock/For WBEZ

“Maybe I’m, like, the music doula,” Woods said. Whitehead — the show’s creator — “has written a bunch of sonic references in the libretto, like: It sounds like an earthquake in slow motion. Or: It sounds like Blind Willie Johnson. I’m pulling all these samples and collaging things.”

Woods grew up in Beverly but lives and works in West Town in an apartment she shares with her sibling Jelani, a computer programmer. Woods was musically gifted from an early age — she performed in a national Irish tin whistle competition by the time she was a preteen. Then again, when it came to her family, she was in good company. Her older sister is singer-songwriter Jamila Woods, a soulful performer who needs little introduction in Chicago’s musical firmament and is touring Europe this spring with a new album, “Water Made Us.” The youngest Woods sister, Kamaria, also sings.

The siblings collaborate on each others’ projects, too. Ayanna and Kamaria sang supporting vocals on “Water Made Us,” and Ayanna crops up as a composition and production credit across Jamila’s discography. Likewise, Jamila helps Ayanna with her wordsmithing.

“She was really involved in the slam poetry scene with Young Chicago Authors, so she comes to music from a writing background. I’ve learned a lot from her,” Woods said.

Besides belting out Disney songs on road trips, Jamila and Ayanna also sang together in the Chicago Children’s Choir, now called Uniting Voices Chicago. Performing in the citywide choir gave Woods a sense of “excellence and professionalism” that she still cherishes.

She began to dabble in choral composition her senior year of high school — by now, thankfully, with the aid of notation software. That path was given an encouraging nudge by Josephine Lee after Woods played one of her new works for the Uniting Voices Chicago president on piano.

“She was like, ‘If you come in early to rehearsal on Saturday, and some of the singers come in, too, you can practice it together.’ So, I got to have the room in the mornings, and people came around the piano to sing,” Woods said.

Taylor Glascock

Woods enrolled at Yale University, attracted by a top-flight music program and “strong singing culture.” She joined a handful of student choirs and set Shel Silverstein poems to music for her senior thesis. But while she appreciated the school’s highly theoretical approach to composition, she craved more from what she felt was a single-minded emphasis on Western classical music.

“Even jazz was kind of, like, fringe,” Woods said.

After moving back to Chicago from New Haven, Woods started working at Constellation, a West Lake View venue for noncommercial music of all stripes. The experience plunged her into the boundless world of creative music, an umbrella term for the omnivorous free improvisation tradition for which Chicago is known the world over. She met other collaborators-to-be: Sima Cunningham, Macie Stewart (who perform together as Finom), Ben LaMar Gay and Steve Marquette.

Woods soon picked up electric bass — she had always wanted to sing the bass parts in choir and liked that it was a “buddy instrument,” locking in with the rest of the rhythm section — and started her own band, Yadda Yadda.

But the appeal of writing notated music never went away. Mike Reed, Constellation’s owner, convinced her to apply for Third Coast Percussion’s inaugural creative partnership back in 2017. She has maintained a relationship with the ensemble ever since, which premiered her piece “Double Drum Dutch” in 2022.

Now, Woods is most in demand as a choral composer — a welcome return to what she calls her “musical home base.” Chanticleer, a celebrated all-male vocal ensemble based in San Francisco, invited Woods to become its composer-in-residence in 2020, when she was, in her words, “super unemployed.” The choir’s prompt — to compose something reflecting upon the pandemic — produced “close[r], now” (2021), which Woods based on a March 11, 2020, column by the Los Angeles Times’s theater critic urging all arts venues to “close, now.” The music video for the piece imagines it as a latter-day commedia dell’arte.

The Crossing, a multi-Grammy-winning chamber choir focusing on contemporary music, also reached out to Woods in late 2020, acting on recommendations from onetime Chicago composers Ted Hearne and George Lewis. She became The Crossing’s first-ever resident composer during the 2022/23 season.

Taylor Glascock| For WBEZ

Holding such positions at two of the country’s most prestigious choruses at the same time is all but unheard of. But Woods’s music is just that good, says The Crossing artistic director Donald Nally, also a professor emeritus at Northwestern University.

He initially commissioned her as part of a video series the choir produced ahead of the 2020 election. Woods turned around “Shift,” a piercingly inquisitive piece about that year’s movement to dismantle Confederate monuments. “Why do we build monuments in stone? Stone is brittle. When it cracks, it cuts to your churning core, America,” goes the central refrain.

Nally was blown away. He commissioned Woods to expand the piece into a three-movement version, which has been recorded for release this summer on classical label Navona Records.

“She’s a singer, and you know it from the very start. She totally understands how a singer gets music in their body, how breath works, how to build a climax chorally,” Nally said. “All of that is on display all the time.”

Woods culminated her Crossing residency last September with “Infinite Body,” a 20-minute piece interrogating hyperproductivity and hustle culture. She has grappled with these topics since navigating the health aftershocks of a concussion in 2022, which affected her mental stamina and sensitivity to light and sound.

“I’m not fully at the capacity I was before the concussion, sensory-wise, but I feel like my brain is ready. If I take little risks, even if it’s a bit outside of my comfort zone, my recovery time is very manageable,” Woods said.

After its MCA premiere, “FORCE!” travels onward to the REDCAT Center in Los Angeles later this spring.

As for Woods, she still has a few months left in her residency with Chanticleer, which she’s closing out with a piece inspired by the writings of environmental activist Joanna Macy. She also hopes to release an EP later this year with her band.

She’s a little busier than those Microsoft Paint days, to be sure. But Woods’s boundless creativity? Same as it ever was.