Sunday afternoon at the Burnight Theater Cerritos College played host to the semesterly Faculty Gala. A musical event featuring an eclectic ensemble of talents composed of your Cerritos College’s music department faculty.

Over 10 different professors representing their individual musical disciplines were present at the event to individually and collectively perform a selection of classical music renditions.

The performances were nothing short of superb. Mirroring the quality of the Classical Arts Showcase playing on PBS.

Unless you are enrolled in a musical or theatrical oriented class, the faculty featured on the Gala is generally unknown to most students at school.

To address this issue, the Faculty Gala was created in the late 1960’s as a means to introduce the musical department faculty of this campus to its students in an intimate setting.

According to Dr. Christine Lopez, director of Keyboard Studies and head of the Applied Music program the “Faculty Gala has been more than 20 years, perhaps even longer than I have been here on campus” she said.

Dr. Lopez was also at the event where she performed a piano duo rendition of Born Free, accompanied by professor Greg Schneider.

Other professors including orchestra professor David Betancourt, piano instructor Paul Di Silva, clarinet instructor David Lopez and director of choral studies Ana DeMichele were also present at the event to lend their talents.

Choral director DeMichele offered her comment to sum up the sentiments of the faculty after the event.

”There are very few professions out there that make people happy. I find a lot of fulfillment in what we (muscians) do. Not only does it make us happy, it makes other people happy as well”, she said.