On a recent Friday afternoon, Herricks High School senior Jesse Torres was sitting in a classroom, playing an instrumental piece he’d written on guitar for a group of his peers.
Torres, a member of the Tri-M National Music Honor Society, is an accomplished musician. But he was playing the piece to get feedback from fellow members of the Herricks Songwriting Club.
After the group’s applause, one fellow student asked why he had changed the ending of the piece. Another student suggested the instrumental piece lent itself to lyrics, but Torres said he wanted to keep the piece in instrumental form.
“It’s a more relaxed environment than other music groups,” Kerri Anne DiBattista, a vocalist and keyboard player who serves on the club’s executive board, said following the session. “If there was something you couldn’t do in a more structured ensemble, you can do it here.”
DiBattista said the Songwriting Club provides students with an environment conducive to personal creativity.
Herricks senior Sameer Kahn, who followed Torres’s performance of his original piece, played a subdued version of Damien Rice’s “Delicate” on guitar.
The other members of the club applauded both his performance and his choice of the song.
Original songs aren’t required material for the weekly club meetings, but Kahn, who is president of the Herricks Tri-M honor society chapter, said the club gives its members motivation to write their own material.
“In songwriting club, you have to push yourself to create,” Kahn said.
Herricks High School English teacher and musician Alan Semerdjian said the students set the agenda when he agreed to be the club’s faculty advisor five years ago. Students were working informally together with another Herricks teacher, Mike Stein, a musician who suggested they approach Semerdjian when they wanted to create a formal club.
Semerdjian, who is a songwriter, sees the club as a space where students can address personal issues they don’t typically address in their classrooms.
“They enjoy it because it’s not the kind of conversation that takes place in the typical part of a school day,” he said. “When we have an hour a week devoted to songs I think kids get excited about it and it enables them to discuss part of themselves.”
In the free-form club, students can write songs, perform or attend meetings to simply discuss music that has a meaning for them. Semerdjian they often talk about the structure of songs and how the verses, choruses of some songs digress from traditional formulas.
“It turned out we created a space to discuss the role of songwriting in our lives, whether we‘re writing songs or moved by songs,” he said. “The students who are not actually performing in front of the club also are involved because they end up sharing songs that have moved them or interested them.”
The students have the opportunity to perform in informal showcases a few times a year to have the experience of sharing their material with others outside the club. The students performed earlier this month at The Cup in Wantagh.
“Performing exposes you to a different experience,” said singer and guitarist Dmitri Grammatikopolous.
Semerdjian said he’s seen a transformation in students in the club who become accustomed to performing in front of others with breaking out their guitars and singing becomes “second nature” to them.
Grammatikopolous said performing in the Herricks High School Chamber Choir as a sophomore sparked his interest in joining the club and writing his own songs.
For singer Meera Desai, the club was a welcome musical departure from what her formalized experience of music had been before high school. Her first songwriting experience was writing the lyrics to a song in collaboration with another member of the club in her sophomore year.
“Songwriting club was a way to wind down from classical music,” she said. “It also exposed me to different types of music.”
Semerdjian said he sees the club as a kind of antidote to formal music instruction that can sometimes inhibit students’ creative impulses.
“It’s demystifying the process that goes into songwriting,” Semerdjian said. “Sometimes we’re so precious about our art, it gets in the way of our growth.”
