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Jessica Bejarano is the founder and conductor of the San Francisco Philharmonic. Bejarano was featured on NBC's The Today Show with Natalie Morales as the “Woman Breaking Barriers as a Trailblazing Symphony Conductor.” She has been featured on PBS News Hour Weekend. Bejarano was also named as ''One of 10 artists to Watch in
KQED KQED may refer to: * KQED (TV), a PBS member station in San Francisco * KQED-FM KQED-FM (88.5 MHz) is a NPR-member radio station in San Francisco, California. Its parent organization is KQED Inc., which also owns its television partners, both ...
Arts’ Bay Brilliant Top 10 Artists of 2018.''


Early life and education

Bejarano grew up in Bell Gardens southeast of Los Angeles, California, raised by a single mother. When Bejarano's older brother Rigoberto brought his trumpet home in middle school, Bejarano would sneak into the case and play the instrument. She taught herself to play for a year before joining her middle school band. She continued in marching bands and later auditioned for the Troopers, a prestigious competitive drum and bugle corp. In return for a two-summer commitment to the corp, the Troopers would help Bejarano get a full scholarship to
Casper College Casper College is a public community college in Casper, Wyoming. It is one of the largest and most comprehensive community colleges in the region. Established in 1945 as Wyoming's first junior college and initially located on the third floor o ...
in Wyoming,
"I was working on my degree in music education, and I did residencies where I had to go into a middle school or high school, just to get the hands-on experience of working with children. And one of my mentors looked at me and said, ‘How are you going to stand in front of children, looking the way you do?’ At that point, aside from having tattoos, I had 13 piercings on my face,” she chuckles. “I said, ‘it doesn’t matter what I look like, I know the material, and I know how to educate, motivate, and inspire music in those kids.’
Bejarano transferred with a full scholarship to University of Wyoming in Laramie to complete her BA in music education. Classical music was not a part of her childhood in the low-income minority community Bejarano grew up in. Bejarano did not discover classical music until her first year in college. In order to fulfil the requirements of her trumpet music scholarship, Bejarano had to play in a few ensembles. When she did, she said "it was like that music was already ingrained in erbody, but it just needed to be activated." Bejarano's initial degrees were in music education as she had aspired to be a music educator at a prestigious high school or college. When she decided to change her focus to conducting, she said she probably would have been dissuaded if she had realized how complicated that is for women and how much more complicated that would be for a woman with her background and ethnicity. She was told many times that she would "never be a successful conductor in the U.S. due to her looks and background." After graduating from University of California, Davis, Bejarano was accepted into a doctoral program in orchestral conducting at University of South Carolina. She was also offered a $2000 per year position as assistant conductor of the
Peninsula Symphony The Peninsula Symphony is an American symphony orchestra, based in the San Francisco Peninsula, California. The orchestra consists of over 90 community musicians. In 1995, the Peninsula Symphony was featured in a PBS broadcast. Since its beginn ...
in Los Altos, California. Bejarano chose to conduct instead of pursuing her doctorate.


Career

Bejarano started her conducting career as an assistant conductor of the
Peninsula Symphony The Peninsula Symphony is an American symphony orchestra, based in the San Francisco Peninsula, California. The orchestra consists of over 90 community musicians. In 1995, the Peninsula Symphony was featured in a PBS broadcast. Since its beginn ...
. Later she became the principal conductor of the San Francisco Civic Symphony, the oldest symphony west of the Mississippi. Bejarano is also assistant conductor of Opera Parallele in San Francisco, California, and a guest conductor for the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony. She has been a guest conductor in Russia, Bulgaria, Italy, Romania, Spain, Venezuela, Finland and the Czech Republic, and with orchestras in the U.S. from Santa Cruz to Baltimore. She is a regular guest conductor with ''Camerata Antonio Soler Orchestra'' in San Lorenzo de el Escorial, Spain. Bejarano was the first woman to conduct L.A.'s American Youth Symphony in 2019. In 2019, Bejarano founded the San Francisco Philharmonic, an 80 piece symphony created to "reflect the glorious diversity of the
Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Gov ...
nd to beaccessible to all."


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bejarano, Jessica American women conductors (music) Living people 21st-century American conductors (music) Musicians from Los Angeles LGBT people from the San Francisco Bay Area American LGBT women American women composers American trumpeters University of California, Davis alumni Year of birth missing (living people) People from Bell Gardens, California Women trumpeters 21st-century American women musicians American LGBT musicians 21st-century American LGBT people