Curiously though, she never thought of actually becoming a musician. After high school, she took advantage of an art scholarship for the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, United States, in 2010. The scholarship required that Pamela be an assistant music director in the Performing Arts department. This meant she would be involved in musicals, making music arrangements as well as playing the violin in plays. “That made me go back to music and made me wonder if, perhaps, I should continue my path in it,” the 27-year-old said during a recent interview with The Jakarta Post in Jakarta.

She then continued her studies at the Berklee College of Music in Boston in January 2015, where she also got a scholarship. One of her teachers there encouraged Pamela to pursue music composition. “Before that, I never even thought of composing,” she said. Though her first trial at composing was accompanied by doubts, her teacher’s praise slowly built up her confidence. “The first time I presented my composition in class, I was terrified and embarrassed,” she remembered.

At Berklee, amid learning about traditional and contemporary music theories, and surrounded by various types of music from her peers, Pamela sensed that she found something she wanted to do. “I felt that music was something I could work in for life,” she said.

“Film study graduates were asking if I’d be interested in writing scores for their movies,” she said. The movies were then submitted to festivals, such as the Tribeca and Sundance festivals.

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After graduating in May 2018, Pamela became a full-time composer in New York. She also teaches part-time at a small music school on Long Island. Her most recent project is a percussion compassion titled “Cenderawasih: A Dance in Paradise”, performed by a Membranophon percussion duo from New York.

Inspired by the Balinese Cenderawasih dance Pamela saw on YouTube, she conducted research in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Gamelan Ensemble. She mixed the rhythm of the dance with contemporary melodies. The piece is to join other songs she has written in the last two years on her debut album. “After being exposed to contemporary music [in college], I immediately experimented, and those songs are the result of that. The hard job now is to find musicians to play them,” said the composer, who cited Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler as her all-time favorite composers.

Planning to release the album by the middle of the year, Pamela also envisioned her debut solo concert alongside her painting exhibition in Jakarta afterward. “I also wish to write an opera based on Indonesian stories, such as Ken Arok,” she said.

Looking back, Pamela said the experience at Berklee taught her to be open to new things. “They made me able to hear differently and more sensitively. I used to think that my style was romantic and there were things I thought I could never understand, such as Arnold Schoenberg’s and Toru Takemitsu’s contemporary and experimental pieces. But as I learned their music, they helped me to learn new and exciting things. It resonates with my own life, that it’s good to be open and to embrace new things,” she said.

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