A part of the El Camino College campus remains rooted in the past.

The bricks are older, the building smaller, the wax shine on the floors thick and creamy, the chipped and faded bulletin boards reminiscent of a worn elementary school or church basement.

The halls of the El Camino College (ECC) music building close in and transport visitors back in time. This time-portal opens to a courtyard on the other side where several days a week, people gather for choral classes.

At the start of class on Tuesday, Nov. 16, Joanna Nachef, ECC director of choral activities reminded the students that the Holiday Extravaganza is only two weeks away.

The first topic covered: what to wear when you perform at the concert.

“Do not wear green tennis shoes,” Nachef said as she handed out long black dresses to some students for the Extravaganza.

Nearly two years since the start of the global pandemic that locked down students and cut people off from gathering together for live music, ECC’s Center for the Arts will welcome people back on Dec. 4 to the Extravaganza featuring the uniting of ECC’s three choirs – the Chorale, Concert Choir and Women’s Chorus.

“I love it,” said Danielle Sung about the ECC music classes she is taking. “The concert is especially important at a time when there is so much division in the nation. It’s our way to bring to the audience a sense of unity, all three choirs working together for the same goal.”

The unity Sung described was evident in class. Some of the singers were ECC students and some were ECC community residents. Some were music majors, many were not.

Individuals with piercings and green hair stood alongside middle-aged women with bobbed hair and sweaters. A young man in a dark suit was next to a young man in shorts and a hoodie with red Beats headphones hanging around his neck.

Some dream of becoming Broadway stars, others hope to be veterinarians, nurses or teachers. Students and community members of all races, genders, ages and interests had come together to make music magic.

“We have worked so hard all semester to prepare,” Nachef said. “There are students who are working to build a professional music career. And some never sang before except in the shower. But all together, we’re going to have such beautiful music.”

Sung said that the concert will include jazz performances and ‘Gloria’ by Italian Baroque composer Antonio Lucio Vivaldi.

Directed by Nachef and Soyun Kang, a part-time music lecturer at ECC, the Extravaganza will also highlight solos by students in ECC’s applied music program.

“We always perform some classical music, the old stuff, mostly in other languages. And it’s just beautiful. Music in English is not nearly as beautiful,” said Renee Zoota-Lucero, an ECC applied music major studying vocal performance and classical/Broadway.

Music in Nachef’s classes has no expiration date, no calculation of cool, no borders or boundaries. From baroque to bebop, from Handel to hip hop, the music has a place and all composers a fan base.

The reasons people are studying music at ECC are just as varied.

Arianna Mejia, for one, is majoring in animal science with a music minor. While she comes from a family of artists, she is the first person in her family to go to college. She hopes to be a large animal veterinarian and has already been accepted to the University of California, Davis.

“I was volunteering as a teaching assistant at Madrona Middle School in Torrance where I used to be a student,” Mejia said.

A teacher at the middle school told her about ECC when she recognized that Mejia loved teaching.

“If I can’t work as a vet, I want to teach music,” Mejia said.

Brandy Morales wanted to study music at ECC since she was 4 or 5 and she and her sister performed in a children’s choir at the college. Because of the children’s choir, Morales found musical theater and eventually performed the part of Anita in West Side Story at Haven Academy of the Arts, a youth theater company.

“Music has inspired me and kind of gave me direction in my life,” Morales said.

She plans to transfer next year to California State University Fullerton and hopes to have a career on Broadway. Graduates of ECC’s music program have transferred to state universities and colleges throughout California, as well as to Julliard and Berklee College of Music.

“ECC has amazing professors that have a really good sense of how to teach music in a way that we can grasp it,” Morales added.

Sung is currently studying music part-time at ECC, and is working to become a nurse. Nachef invited her to join the chorale because Sung’s mother is in Nachef’s professional choir.

“Friendship breeds familiarity,” Sung said. “It’s also so hard to say no to your mother.”

Zoota-Lucero said she has loved music for her entire life and has performed in choirs since sixth grade, but she began school as a civil engineering major. A lot of music majors start off in science and math and switch to music, she said.

“I wanted to map out cities. Roads and traffic lights are so interesting, but, so much of music theory is math and I love that,” Zoota-Lucero said.

Zoota-Lucero is now a music major in vocal performance for classical music and Broadway.

“With Broadway, a lot of it is teaching you how to perform as you sing. The back row of an audience should not only be able to see you but to know how the person [in the song] is feeling,” Zoota-Lucero said.

In the applied music program, students get weekly private lessons with a professional singer, Zoota-Romero said. By the time a student finishes the program, they have developed each of their songs with their coach and performed them in front of the class to get feedback from their peers.

“That’s 12 expertly-honed songs you can pull out of your back pocket. You find out, ‘Hey, there’s this audition in a week,’ no way are you gonna be ready. But if you’re just reviewing one of those songs that you already spent so much time on, you’re good to go,” Zoota-Lucero said.

This year’s Extravaganza, however, has brought the three choirs together to work towards a common goal. But yet, these individuals haven’t been practicing in person for more than 20 months.

“[During the pandemic], it was certainly unprecedented to teach choral music online,” Nachef says.

At first, Nachef and the students used Zoom, but the delays made singing together impossible.

“So, I asked the students to silence their videos, but keep their cameras on. I would sit at the piano, or my accompanist would be sitting at the piano in his home, and I would listen to each student one at a time,” Nachef said.

Eventually, they found Jamulus, an online platform that enables people to play or sing music with each other in real-time. ECC created a server and suddenly everyone heard each other and could sing together.

“Each person recorded their video with audio and we created virtual choirs,” Nachef said. “It sounded like we were all in one room making music.”

Now everyone is back together physically, although the class size was cut from more than 60 students to less than 30 to allow for distancing. The students are wearing special masks created for singers that protect against COVID but don’t muffle sound.

Nachef and a pianist begin with vocal warm-ups, and the students’ harmonizing of the scales floats above the chaos and uncertainty of the world. Music is an anecdote for anxiety, Zoota-Lucero said.

“One on one, I’m okay. But talking to small groups is freaky as hell. It ramps my anxiety way up. But if I’m performing to a crowd of 300, I’m all good,” Zoota-Lucero said. “I get on stage and that’s it! I’m a whole different person.”

Morales credits music for reducing her stress. “Getting into adulthood and finding a purpose has been really challenging mentally,” Morales said.

But for an hour in class, Morales said she focuses on what she’s singing, “lives in the music,” and lets go of anything she feels stressed or confused about.

Vivaldi, whose composition will be highlighted at the show, was a priest, but found his purpose in music. Most of his works, including Gloria, were written for the all-female choir such as the Ospedale della Pieta, according to biographers Karl Heller, Marc Pincherle and H.C. Robbins Landon, authors of books about Vivaldi.

ECC’s masked choirs are bringing Vivaldi’s music to a community needing healing and reconnection after the devastation of a pandemic.

During the COVID closing of campus, Nachef said that music classes gave herself and the students a purpose to get out of bed every morning.

“I dressed up as you see me now with makeup and heels and I sat at that piano in my house as if I had walked into all my classes at ECC,” Nachef said.

Nachef is dressed all in black, with a black leather jacket and black hair that hangs to the middle of her back. Her lower face is shielded by a black rhinestone mask through which red lipstick is visible.

Everyone must make sure to find “that window of opportunity” no matter the barriers they face, Nachef said. “We need to continue to do what we were made to do.”

Social distancing, masks, completion of a health screening questionnaire and a temperature check will be required for the Holiday Extravaganza audience and only 300 guests will be admitted to a theater with 2,048 seats.

“We’re back in person,” Nachef said, “and we want you to be there. Because without an audience, it would just be a rehearsal.”

Holiday Extravaganza

What: Performances by the ECC Chorale, Concert Choir and Women’s Chorus

When: Dec. 4

Where: Marsee Auditorium

Ticket information: Tickets can be purchased online and visitors can email [email protected] for more information.

Pricing: $10 per person

Editor’s Note: Additional photos and captions were added for more context about the story on Dec. 1 at 10:36 p.m.

Editor’s Note Dec. 6, 2021,  8:20 p.m.: Story updated to change photo sizes and placement for readability.