When Lexington Music was at the end of their rope in 2024, Duaner Lopez and Jonathan Perez stepped up to continue Lexington Music’s legacy.
As a freshman majoring in Finance, Lopez is the current president of Lexington Music, and sophomore CIS major Perez is the club treasurer. As students in a business school, the duo wanted to continue having a space meant for creativity and to fulfill a specific niche.
“Coming from a high school that was very oriented towards performing arts, I definitely sought to fill in that niche,” Lopez said.
During COVID-19 and its aftermath, the club’s activity and events started diminishing. The previous club president stated the club would not exist after the fall 2024 semester, which prompted Lopez and Perez to take over.
For Lopez, his taste in music is mainly jazz and bossa nova. As for Perez, he is interested in indie and Spanish rock.
“Growing up, hearing Mexican music specifically, I’ve fallen in love with the genre… it’s really satisfying the culture living on and new things being created every day,” he said.
The current club initially struggled to recruit more members and coordinate time to practice together. Initially, the three people in the club only played the guitar, with Lopez learning the bass. The duo’s first show was during Baruch’s “Phantom of the Opera” event, where club members performed around five songs.
“It was an experience I really cherished because it was the first time really performing in front of a crowd,” Perez said. “Looking back on it, it’s kind of the start of everything.”
Their first performance since directing the club was at the “Battle of Lexington” basketball game, which brought the challenge of directing more people and performing under a stricter time limit.
“That performance is definitely a hallmark of what became our standard routine of preparing for events and how to reach out to people,” Lopez said.
Now the club consists of vocalists and musicians who play a variety of instruments like the piano, saxophone, cello, violin, drums, and more. However, it is a challenge to find suitable times for members to practice playing together.
Some of the group’s favorite songs to play are “Smooth Operator” by Sade, “Come Inside of my Heart” by IV of Spades, and “From the Start” by Laufey.
Lexington Music is always seeking to improve their skills through feedback and recordings of their performances.
“With that criticism, we are the talented musicians that we are,” Lopez said. The most motivational aspect of running the club is being able to see their performance and members’ improvement.
Lopez and Perez hope to continue running the club for the remainder of their time at Baruch. While exploring their career prospects in other fields is important, they say music will always be dear to them.
“A lot of times you have to stop for a second and just reorganize yourself as best as you can and keep moving forward,” Perez advised. “But you also have to be realistic about what you can and can’t do.”
Lexington Music is open to partnering with clubs to play music for their events. Lexington Music can be found on their Instagram page @lexingtonmusic or jamming in their club suite.
