| Regular admissions. A smaller number of students are invited to the honors program. The school is half the size of most UC's and is in a lovely location. It has a graduate program in music, too, with some impressive graduates. Edwin Outwater, who was the asst. conductor at the SF Symphony and the conductor of the SFSYouth Orchestra, went there in conducting (he had a BA from Harvard).
For the music department, you must audition for both the BMus and the BA. I don't know how selective they are. There are scholarships to be had, though (in the range of $1,000 per year) for top applicants planning to be performance majors.
UCSB does not have a separate performance school, so is not like UCLA, where if you don't pass the screening you are simply not admitted to UCLA.
You should check on this, but I imagine that the way to handle sending in a CD and having it actually listened to, would be to contact the music department and see if someone would listen, and if they liked what they heard, let the admissions office know. I know of a student who did that at Cal. He probably would have been admitted in any event (he turned down Yale for Cal), but he ended up in the orchestra and chamber programs, so he made some connections right from the start (of course, he could have participated in orchestra anyway...) |