Summer Students Take Their Music to Next Level in LA

At the end of a day in Berklee’s summer programs in Los Angeles, professor Mike Farquharson doesn’t see his teenage students wanting to cut loose and chill out on LA’s summer nights. They’re too absorbed. Instead, they often stay in the classroom, sometimes until late in the evening, making music.

“And they go home and work on the stuff at night, stay up late, and come back first thing in the morning raring and ready to go,” Farquharson, the artistic and academic director of the program, says.

Video: Explore Berklee's Summer Programs in LA

“Our goal is to take them from where they are and bring them to the next level,” Jason Camelio, Berklee’s director of summer programs in LA and Global Initiatives, says. “We’re working to expose them to many different facets of being a writer, a performer, a business person, (and) working on the production side of things.”

Berklee offers two one-week programs in Los Angeles. The first, It’s All in the Song, focuses on songwriting and the business of music; the second, the Contemporary Performance Program, exposes students to a wide range of performance experiences and instructs them on instrument technique.

Tony Rosales, a high school sophomore from Los Angeles, said he came to the performance program because he felt intermediate in his music and confident that the Berklee program was the best place to improve.

“I’m learning different types of music that I don’t normally play or even listen to. I’m learning more music theory … and it’s great,” he says.

What Sean Skeete, assistant chair of Berklee’s Ensemble Department, particularly loves to see is the moment when it all comes together for a student. “There are a lot of ‘aha!’ moments, or eureka moments, where, ‘Oh, that’s what my teacher back home was saying. Oh, now I get it.’”

In one of Skeete's classes, after he asked students to clap along to understand a rhythmic concept, a girl who “got it” shot her hand up and then darted to the dry-erase board to write down the musical notes that correlated with the clapping. 

It’s this hands-on experience, and the critical but constructive feedback from active, professional performers, that helps the students improve in just a week.

“We see kids grow, in a short amount of time, an enormous amount,” says Tom Whaley, an instructor at the Contemporary Performance Program who also works as the jazz band director at Santa Monica High School, where the programs take place.

Heidi Jauregui, a 16-year-old pianist and singer-songwriter from Covina, California, who won a scholarship to Berklee’s Five-Week Program as a result of her participation in the Los Angeles programs, says the performance program helped her overcome stage fright.

When Jauregui took the stage in the students’ final performance to sing her original composition “Heaven Knows” before an audience of peers, parents, friends, and faculty, she seemed as comfortable as a seasoned performer.

“Many times we see people who are very shy or maybe reluctant to play in front of people,” Farquharson says. “By the end of the program, I don’t see that at all. Everyone is anxious to get up on stage, to play, to participate in the making of great music.”