Youth Orchestra Salinas has a new music director, Jeffrey de Seriere.

Youth Orchestra Salinas (YOSAL) has a new music director, Jeffrey de Seriere, who started as interim music director in January, has already made a significant impact, according to YOSAL. At the same time, De Seriere teaches at Cabrillo College in Aptos.

“Fortunately, my work with YOSAL is on Mondays when I don’t teach at the college,” he says. 

While at Cabrillo he teaches students as mature as 86 years old, with YOSAL he is working with middle school and high school students, many of them fourth- to sixth-graders.

“My students are all at different points of their musician journey and on a variety of levels,” he says. “Some of them will study music in college, some will become musicians and others will become great consumers of music.”

De Seriere himself started in third grade, playing plastic recorders. Initially he wanted to master percussion, but drums in the house sounded like a risky idea. Thanks to his grandfather, a jazz lover, he eventually picked up the saxophone. 

Conducting was something he tried at a young age thanks to his middle school mentor, conductor Gina Holcomb. He emulated her and she was very encouraging, he says. He had an opportunity to conduct in high school, including during football games, thanks to another great mentor Tom Philips. 

“Going though the music library he [Philips] made available to us,” de Seriere says, “I found an old VHS with a recording of Leonard Bernstein. He was conducting his opera, Candide. I think the year was 1989. That’s how I really caught the bug.”

De Seriere made his international conducting debut with the Cal State Long Beach Wind Symphony in Seoul, South Korea. Before his employment at Cabrillo College, he teached in several schools, such as the Orange County School of the Arts and California School of the Arts in San Gabriel Valley, where his groups consistently earned superior ratings at local and regional music festivals. He had put his work on pause to get his doctorate in conducting from Northwestern University, Illinois.

“Teaching keeps you on your toes,” he says about his current work. “It’s a great challenge because music can become their [the students’] life. I’m really interested in connecting on an individual level and thinking how I can help.”