Are music competitions necessary?

violindad
Tue, 23 Jul 2013 11:35:43 +0000

At most schools the audition will far outweigh any list of competitions that you have won. I don’t think that most of the auditioning panels were even aware of the competitions my son had won.

Not all schools required this information; for those that did, I am not certain that the information was passed on to the panel; when it was passed on, I suspect that the panel was busy enough that they frequently would not have had time to read the lists of competitions won for the 300 students auditioning; when a list was submitted, was passed on to faculty, and was read by faculty, I suspect they might not remember who won what.

So, if your question is (as you appear to have stated): “Do I need to have competed in order to gain entry to music school?”, then the answer is a definite “no.” You can get into the best music schools in the world without ever having competed in anything as long as you play well.

If you question is (as the above posters seem to have assumed): “Would it be valuable for me to compete?”, then the answer is a definite “yes” for the very wise reasons that the above posters have given.

My son’s first teacher (with whom he studied for 11 years) did not like competitions at all and thus did nothing to facilitate or help prepare for them. As parents, we chose to enter my son in competitions and believed that they were valuable experiences. Another student of the same teacher who studied with him for over 15 years chose not to do any competitions prior to or during her bachelor’s and master’s degrees and she has had a very successful career thus far; she did, however, gain tons of performing and auditioning experience through other venues, and while working on her PhD with another teacher, she entered a single competition and won it (and it included a national tour of solo performances).