Music Academy of the West Brings Teenage Students from All Over the World to Santa Barbara

Even if kids have to be coerced to pick up an instrument, they might end up loving it.

At least, that was the case for two students in the Music Academy of the West’s brand new summer program, the High School Intensive (HSI).

Emmanuel Malpica, 17, a recent graduate of Santa Barbara High School, started playing violin around 4th grade. Back then, he said, he was really into sports.

“But my mom was like, ‘You should try this violin thing.’ And I tried it. And I wanted to quit,” he said. His mom’s condition: He had to break the news to his violin teacher himself. He was too shy to do it, so he just kept playing.

“I ended up having a passion for the violin,” he said, joking that he now thanks his mom for “forcing him” to play. The teacher who he couldn’t tell he wanted to quit, Kristine Pacheco-Bernt, was the one who encouraged him to apply for the High School Intensive.

It was a similar story for River Hicks, 18, who just graduated from Moorpark High School in Ventura County. Noting his lack of extracurriculars, his friends pushed him to join band in junior high. He picked a random instrument, the French horn, not knowing it is a notoriously difficult instrument to learn.

“For a long time, I hated it,” he said, “but over time, I fell in love with it. It inspired me to do better in school and apply myself in other parts of life.”

Both students — who each belong to a youth orchestra — had the chance to hone their craft over the course of the two-week, tuition-based High School Intensive. It brought together accomplished young musicians, ages 14 to 18, from all over the world to Santa Barbara to learn and play.

The program is the newborn sibling of the Music Academy’s 79-year-old Fellowship Institute for pre-professional musicians, together making up the academy’s 2026 Summer Music Festival & School.

The intensive ran from June 14-25, but will be an annual summer program going forward. It includes private lessons; chamber music coaching and performances; college readiness workshops; and studio classes, taught by experienced teaching artists. Woven in, too, are social experiences for the students to explore Santa Barbara.

“The Festival’s High School Intensive expands the Academy’s renowned training to students at a pivotal point in their artistic growth — those beginning to shape their future paths,” said Shauna Quill, president and CEO of the Music Academy of the West.

“Our phenomenal teaching artists will work closely with these young artists to help guide their next steps,” Quill said. “It will also stand apart as one of the most distinctive high-level programs for high school musicians in the United States.” 

According to the academy, the intensive fills a “vital gap” in West Coast classical music education, for musicians at a formative age to experience the “artistry, discipline, and inspiration that define the Music Academy.”

So what was a day in the program like? Besides breakfast and lunch, their schedules had variety — students were exposed to different instruction modes and activities every day.

Malpica, a commuter student, said his most important lessons were in scales and double stops, as well as techniques to improve sounds with his bow.

He met young musicians from all over the world. He made a friend named Arlan, a student from Russia, who was “very into soccer” and kept his peers up to date on the World Cup. Other students he met were from Texas and China. “It was cool to see what it’s like to learn violin in a different part of the world,” he said.

One day, they had a ping-pong tournament. That really brought out the students’ competitiveness, he laughed.

The musical world right now is a competitive one itself, teachers explained to the students with full honesty. “They told us, ‘If you want to be a professional musician, you have to work really hard,’” Malpica recalled.

That didn’t deter him. “I definitely want to pursue violin and play in a professional orchestra,” he said. He said he left the intensive as a more confident musician.

“I definitely improved and learned a lot of new things that I would not have learned on my own — even learning from my peers around me,” he said.

Hicks’s experience was slightly different, since he was a resident during the program and stayed at Westmont with the other out-of-town students. Scholarships helped make that happen, he said.

“Each day was exciting,” he recounted. “We’d do everything music for the first part of the day.”

But after the final rehearsal at the end of the day, the resident students would let loose, through beach days, concerts with professional musicians, master classes, and even a cruise.

“It was really great to be surrounded by like-minded people. I was able to make a lot of friends and bond with a lot of people,” Hicks said.

He will be going to UC Los Angeles to study music in the fall.

“HSI reaffirmed everything I was thinking about how music is amazing and its want I want to pursue,” he said.

Besides the cruise, Hicks’s favorite moment of the Intensive was the Orchestra Finale, led by Maestro Miguel Harth-Bedoya. Students got a taste of what it is like to play in a full-blown, professional orchestra. This was Malpica’s favorite moment, too.

“I just kept thinking about how I am probably never going to play with the exact same group of people ever again,” Malpica said. “It felt like I was in a professional orchestra. Everyone knew what they were doing, and no one felt lost at all. I felt really privileged to play with them.”