ICOM Student Achieves Placement on Berklee’s Dean’s List

Berklee College of Music recently announced that Steven Chelliah, a former student at ICOM, had earned placement on the Dean’s List for the spring semester of 2008, where to be eligible for this honour, a full-time student must achieve a grade point average of 3.4 or above. This is a great achievement for Steven, a very talented young man who started his formal music education at ICOM.

This enterprising young man is currently writing a book on the theoretical aspects of ‘Fuz Asian’, a harmonic system he has developed which infuses Asian, Western and original elements that produce an ultimate form of World Jazz and Asian Jazz music. The book has received support from his lecturers at Berklee and he plans to get it published via Berklee Press once he graduates.

This is his story :

‘I have grown up around music all my life as I come from a very musically inclined family. The Chelliah’s were always known as the musical family. My interest in music began at the age of five when I started singing with my church choir. When I was seven my parents enrolled me for piano lessons, and that was where I learnt to read and write music for the first time. It was during that time I realized that I had a very strong pair of ears and an ability to listen to many parts when hearing big orchestrations. From that point on, I was nurtured and guided musically by my uncle Mr.Calvin Chelliah, who is no stranger to the local music scene.

I first came to know about Berklee through my uncle, and I decided straight away that I wanted to go there someday. It has been my ardent dream to study at Berklee with the world’s best since I was a kid.

The reason I decided to pursue a professional career in music is because I knew that I was put on this earth to do that. I am currently doing a dual major at Berklee in Jazz Composition & Arranging and Contemporary Writing & Production. I am also further developing my guitar playing skills by taking various jazz guitar labs at Berklee.

I enrolled at ICOM for the Berklee Transfer Program (BTP) in July of 2005. My experience at ICOM was one of the building blocks that has shaped me as an overall musician today. I will never forget all the good memories I have of ICOM, all the great friends I have made. Even the lecturers have become close friends. The best memory I have of my ICOM experience is when I was with the ICOM band for the Gegar U roadshow.We toured all around Malaysia for over 3 months and finally performed live on ASTRO before a sell out audience at the Penang Stadium ( PISA ).

My career vision upon graduating from Berklee in Jazz Composition and Contemporary Writing & Production , is to contribute to the areas of modern opera and film music especially in the global arena as well as the local arena. My ultimate ambition is to show to the world that Malaysians are capable of producing World Class Musicians in various areas of music. This vision is very meaningful to me because once it is accomplished, it will set the pace and the path for many more Malaysian talents to do the same, which is to expose our talent and uniqueness in music to the entire world’.