TranquilOne

My wife and I just returned from a visit to Hartt where our son and his new wife will be entering as grad students--he in composition and she in piano. They auditioned and visited Hartt, Boston U, Minnesota, Kansas, and were accepted in several places. They chose Hartt because the faculty displayed personal interest in their goals and interests, unlike some of the other schools. My son has just finished a masters in trumpet from a small Christian university with an outstanding reputation in music. He felt very much at ease in the Hartt environment and in studying trumpet at Hartt although his interest is now in composition. As a young composer, he has won the MTNA Warner-Bros Composition Contest, was second place in the NATS art song composition contest, won a first place in the National Federation of Music Clubs composition contest, and this year was awarded a $5000 first prize for a choral composition by the John Ness Beck Foundation. He has two wind band works recorded by different bands in the US and premiered his own trumpet concerto in 2007 with our university orchestra. He is not a slouch composer or performer. He developed a short list of criteria for the composition masters and Hartt and the profs met (actually, surpassed) them all. West Hartford, as we found on our visit, is a delightful and beautiful town. The school is in a very nice area. Hartford itself is typical of Northeastern big cities and should not be a concern unless one's child is prone to wander alone and off the beaten path into the sub-standard areas. Pastorale settings offer as much opportunity for trouble as do big cities and campuses everywhere have their problems.