A Berklee Online Alum’s Path Through Classical Music, Rock Bands, Teaching, and Film Scoring Leads to Two Major Premieres in One Weekend
Jocelyn Rowland Khalaf calls herself a “classical runaway.” She has been playing violin since the age of three, and her first love is Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, but she has spent much of her musical life exploring rock, country—her current band, the Holdouts, merges these genres with funk, blues, and soul—and even dabbling in what she calls “symphonic industrial techno metal.” Later this month, two very different parts of her musical life will come together over one remarkable weekend. On Saturday, October 17, she’ll hear the Atlanta Philharmonic Orchestra perform a piece she originally wrote as a Berklee Online homework assignment. The next day, she’ll fly home to Tulsa for the premiere of a documentary she scored. For someone who once ran away from classical music, it’s shaping up to be quite a homecoming.
Let’s start with her Saturday night first. When she submitted her piece, Memories from the Old World, to the Atlanta Philharmonic’s Composition Competition, Rowland Khalaf says she did so to help her overcome a little bit of seasonal malaise.
“I was just kind of in the winter doldrums, and I was like, ‘Okay, I’ve got to be a little constructive, so I’m going to gather up everything I wrote and pick out some things and enter them into these contests,’” she says. “That’s when I remembered the piece I wrote for Orchestration 2, because several of the contests required a full orchestra.”
Connecting with Strawberry Shortcake Creator Muriel Fahrion
As for the film premiere on Sunday night, it’s a documentary about illustrator Muriel Fahrion called Strawberry Colored Glasses. The project is near to Rowland Khalaf’s heart.
“She’s one of my besties,” she says of the 81-year-old who’s best known for drawing the original concepts for Strawberry Shortcake, the Care Bears, and The Get Along Gang.
“We just met each other through another friend who was like, ‘you guys are going to get along!’ And we did,” recalls Rowland Khalaf. “And then a couple of weeks later, I wanted to see Andrew Bird, who’s my absolute favorite, and my husband had to work, so I called her because I thought she might like him. I said, ‘Do you want to go see Andrew Bird in Oklahoma City?’ And she’s like, ‘Yeah!’”
This mid-October weekend is not the first time these two projects have been intertwined. In August, Rowland Khalaf was on the phone with the producer of the Strawberry Shortcake documentary, delivering the final trailer, when she received word from the Philharmonic Orchestra.
“At that exact moment, I got the email from Atlanta that said ‘congratulations on winning!’” she recalls. “He’s like, ‘Whoa! Like, oh my gosh!’ I didn’t think I would win anything; I was just thinking this would be something to do, to organize myself, and might as well try. So I had to leave my meeting with him and make a few phone calls.”
Composing with Auditory Eidetic Memory
Rowland Khalaf says she has had an on-again, off-again relationship with composing.
“I had gotten discouraged from composing because I did have some success when I was 16,” she says.
But that success was shadowed in sadness. She wrote a piece in honor of her late aunt, who was killed by a drunk driver. Mothers Against Drunk Driving used the music in a video training first responders to deliver death notifications.
After that, she says she would still have creative ideas and map them out using the notation software Encore, only to convince herself they sounded too much like something that had already been written.
“I would map it out, and I’m like, ‘That’s already something. I know it,’ and I would delete it,” she says.
Rowland Khalaf describes herself as having auditory eidetic memory, which is similar to a photographic memory, but with music. She says if she’s ever played something, she still knows it. This is perhaps why she felt like everything that she was composing was something she already knew.
“It’s almost like I can feel the interval,” she says. “I’m not thinking 6th, 3rd, octave, but I know it instinctively. It’s also like a filing cabinet. If someone’s like, ‘Oh, can you play The Rite of Spring?’ I may have never actually performed that one, but I can get close.”
While that ability may have arguably hindered her own compositional ambitions, it came in handy during the years she worked as a strolling violinist in Tulsa restaurants, and that was how she met the man who would become her husband.
“He was in with friends one night, and he said, ‘Can you play “Gilligan’s Island”?’ And I said, ‘Of course.’”
The next major piece she wrote was for their wedding in 2017.
“I was like, ‘you know, I’ve played so many weddings, and there’s so many cliché pieces of music. I’m going to write my own processional.’ So I did!”
Billboard Success, Dr. Pepper Campaign, and Learning Logic
She continued to compose more after that, particularly through teaching. Rowland Khalaf spent 14 years in public-school education, including eight years running an orchestra program at a large Tulsa school. She wrote and arranged pieces suited to her students’ abilities and eventually started a Rock Orchestra. “In this whole process, I kind of was dabbling in writing again,” she says.
During those years, she had been playing with a band called We the Ghost, which was finding success on the Billboard charts and in sync, landing a national Dr. Pepper campaign. She watched bandleader Beau Tyler using Logic for the band’s demos, but her public-school teaching job was consuming most of her time, leaving little opportunity to learn the software herself. After the band broke up, she enrolled in a three-course professional certificate in Logic.
“I was just in curiosity mode for a while, and then I got Logic on my computer, and was playing around with it a little bit, but then I was like, ‘I really need to learn this!’” she says. “So between Beau talking about Logic and my friend Karen Naifeh Harmon talking about her experience with Berklee Online, I was like, ‘It’s so obvious, I have to do this!’”
After completing the Logic certificate, Rowland Khalaf watched Harmon begin working on film projects of her own. “I was like, ‘I should try that again,’” she says.
By that point, Rowland Khalaf was also ready for a professional change. She left public-school teaching in 2024, though she says she plans to continue teaching private lessons.
Orchestrating with Inspiration from Dvořák
She decided to keep the momentum going by signing up for a five-course professional certificate in Composing and Orchestrating for Film and TV. In the summer semester of 2024, she wrote Memories from the Old World, which will receive its premiere later this month in Atlanta.
“Ben Newhouse gave us the specific orchestration requirements so naturally I decided there had to be a dramatic violin solo,” she says. “Once I got going on it, it began to feel a little Dvořák-esque, which makes sense due to the fact that as a child my dad and I would listen to Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, Rachmaninoff, etc. on repeat. I have also always loved tone poems or pieces with stories like Danse Macabre, Scheherazade, Night on Bald Mountain, etc.”
But Memories from the Old World wasn’t the only thing to come out of Rowland Khalaf’s return to composing. Her Berklee Online studies had also prepared her for the other half of her upcoming weekend: film scoring.
PowDot Studios, the Tulsa-based filmmakers behind Strawberry Colored Glasses, first hired her to score their feature film When the Rain Comes. The film premiered at Tulsa’s Circle Cinema and went on to win Best Narrative Feature at the Circle Cinema Film Festival.
That collaboration ultimately led to Strawberry Colored Glasses, which brings the two strands of Rowland Khalaf’s story together on consecutive nights in October. And neither appears to be a one-off. She says she is already at work co-writing another original score, this time for the National Animation Museum in Los Angeles.
It’s another addition to a musical résumé that has taken her through rock, country, metal, film scoring, and plenty of places in between. But when asked which genre feels most like home base, Rowland Khalaf doesn’t hesitate.
“Well, classical, because of my training,” she says.
