A New Heritage

In the late 1970s, aspiring musicians in Brazil who wanted to study their country’s own rich traditions, from samba to bossa nova, or who might want to focus on jazz, relied on a private and informal network of teachers to learn from. There were no schools specializing in popular or contemporary music; all formal courses of study were in classical music, offered by government schools.

Antônio Mário da Silva Cunha, a recent music-education graduate from Faculdade Marcelo Tupinambá, saw this void and the opportunity it presented. In 1980, he founded a conservatory in which he was both owner and teacher, instructing students on piano and electric organ. He named his new school after the legendary Brazilian conductor and composer João de Souza Lima.

Today, the Faculdade e Conservatório Souza Lima, in São Paulo, Brazil, is the premiere college of contemporary music in its country and a trailblazer on its continent: In 2007, it became the first private contemporary music school in South America to offer degrees. And it was one of the first two to establish a credit-transfer agreement with Berklee (the other music school being Escuela de Música Contemporánea in Argentina). This agreement helps students remain home and save money while earning credits they can later apply toward a Berklee degree.

A key person in Souza Lima’s transformation is Lupa Santiago B.M. '98 M.M. ’00, the college’s pedagogical coordinator. Cunha met him while on a 1998 trip to Berklee in which Cunha was trying to set up a partnership between the two schools. “I approached Berklee to present Souza Lima as a modern school, a pioneer school, and a school with a vision of international exchange and with a mission to be recognized internationally and nationally,” Cunha says. In Santiago, a student at the time, he found just the person to build that connection between the two institutions, and hired him to begin the day after he completed his master’s degree in jazz improvisation.

“How Souza Lima is, because of the vision that I had, was because I was at Berklee once,” Santiago says. Beginning in 2000, he started to change the curriculum so that the first two years at Souza Lima approximated Berklee’s curriculum. He had the students use Berklee textbooks and he brought in Berklee alumni to teach. Today, of the 25 faculty members at Souza Lima, about a third are Berklee alumni. “If it wasn’t for Berklee, Souza Lima would not be at the level that it is now, recognized as the biggest private school in Brazil and well-known internationally,” he says.

The school has grown over the years to one that includes a graduate program and an online school, and offers undergraduate degrees in performance and in composition and arranging. It has three branches in the city of São Paulo and another several hours away, in Lençóis Paulista.

The institution is one of Berklee’s 25 academic partners, schools from which Berklee accepts transfer credits. “Souza Lima is an important global partner for Berklee because they are a primary connecting point for the music of Brazil and the world,” says Jason Camelio, the assistant vice president of Berklee Global Initiatives. “Their exceptional teaching team covers every genre from classical traditions and Brazilian traditions to the most contemporary jazz, to heavy metal and electronic music, as well as composition and music production. They publish their own books, deliver online courses, and are an educational institution that world-renowned artists regularly visit. Their new facility is world-class.”

Souza Lima was initially a place where Berklee took the World Scholarship Tour, but the relationship between the two schools evolved to include a credit-transfer agreement as Berklee noticed the exceptional talent coming from the Brazilian school.

“Souza Lima is responsible for transforming me into a real musician over the course of two years,” says Artur Vienna, a ninth-semester student majoring in performance and in music production and engineering who transferred to Berklee. Students can transfer as many as 48 credits (about two years’ worth) from Souza Lima. “Being able to learn the core of music education in my mother tongue allowed me to strengthen the foundations necessary to thrive here at Berklee.”

Luis Augusto Buff de Souza e Silva B.M. ’12, who transferred to Berklee to study music business, says that he and his classmates who had come from Souza Lima had a similar experience. “We all felt that same feeling, like we were really well-prepared,” says Buff, who now works as the senior director of music business and legal affairs at NBCUniversal.

Like Buff, who had earned his first degree in law  before starting the Souza Lima program, Adriano Souza was a working professional, a civil engineer, when he decided to pursue his music education at Souza Lima and later transfer to Berklee. “I wanted to study directly at the source, where all that music theory, where jazz, the basis of the curriculum, came from,” says Souza, an eighth-semester student majoring in jazz composition and in contemporary writing and production.

"Every Berklee Week at Souza Lima was life-changing for students. It was a super ex perience. One month later I could see the difference in every student who attended.”

Normally, about 12 to 20 students transfer from Souza Lima to Berklee every year, and as many as 150 audition for acceptance to Berklee, but those numbers have dropped since the start of the pandemic. The reasons, says Santiago, are twofold: The Brazilian real has lost almost half its value against the dollar, and Berklee faculty and staff haven’t visited Souza Lima in the past couple of years because of safety concerns around COVID-19.

During this time, Berklee conducted online programs at Souza Lima, but these programs didn’t energize students the way in-person visits did, Santiago says.

“Every Berklee Week at Souza Lima was life-changing for students. It was a super experience. One month later I could see the difference in every student who attended Berklee Week,” Santiago says of students’ proficiency on instruments, of the energy they were putting into their studies, and of the quality of their questions. Students realized, he says, how much music meant to them.

In contrast, he adds, “When you see Berklee on the screen of your computer or on your phone…it’s such a far-away experience.”

The virtual Berklee events get lost among so much other online messaging, he says. “[Students] care about Berklee like they care about the next post. It’s just one more thing. It’s not a dream. Before, when we announced [Berklee Week] it was like, ‘Man, I cannot miss this date. It’s super-important; I have to be there. I’ll cancel my dentist, I’ll cancel all my classes…and I will be only at Berklee Week,’ and people from all over Brazil came.”

Though Berklee cut back on all but the most essential travel during the pandemic, Camelio says that his team hopes to visit Souza Lima in early 2023.

The number of students who enrolled in Souza Lima’s program also fell during the past two years. Normally, about 120 students audition for acceptance to the school, and about 75 enroll; this year about 55 applied and 40 entered. Overall, including its online program, Souza Lima now has about 600 students, down from 1,500 at its peak a decade ago.

The pandemic isn’t the only factor that explains the drop. The rise in the number of people turning to informal online instruction, such as YouTube videos, has also cut into Souza Lima’s numbers. Before the platform came into existence, teenagers would study with a private teacher for years, getting consistent feedback and instruction. Now, Santiago says, they watch a few online videos and feel they are good to go.

The result is that fewer students end up pursuing a program of music education—whether that be in structured online courses, such as Berklee Online or Souza Lima’s online programs, or in person. That said, he adds, “YouTube is a great tool if it’s used together with a teacher.”

Now that the pandemic is ebbing, Santiago says he wants to work on getting Souza Lima back to where it was just before COVID-19 hit, in terms of the number of students and the growth of its initiatives. These include strengthening the association Souza Lima founded, the Latin American Association of Music Schools (ALAEMUS), which brings students to Souza Lima from across Latin America.

And, eventually, as Souza Lima regains its footing, more talented South American artists will return to Berklee. Although the transition can be financially difficult for many, it can also change the course of their lives. Santiago considers attending Berklee the best thing he’s done, and an experience that connected him to musicians worldwide. An active performer, Santiago says that he’s met Berklee alumni in every one of the hundreds of shows he’s played in more than 40 countries. “That is a heritage,” he says. “It’s something you're going to carry all your life.”

This article appeared in the spring/summer 2022 issue of Berklee Today.