Case Music majors

rhapsodynshadow
Sun, 05 Mar 2006 18:34:22 +0000

I started writing before but got a bit sidetracked. Basically, the music department at case is pretty small, but fairly good. I’m not a student, but I’m in a youth wind symphony that rehearses at case and is directed by case faculty and grad students. My private lesson teacher graduated from case and is now there pursuing her masters in music education. The nice thing about case’s program is its proximity with the Cleveland Institute of Music. There is the ability to cross register for both cim students and case students. I’m not sure how easy this is to do however, since CIM’s a pretty intense music school and Case is a pretty intense university. The only faculty member I know fairly well is Dr. Ciepluch. He’s one of those people who you either love or you can’t stand. I rehearse with another somewhat more intense orchestra downtown, with a lot of ex-youth wind symphony students. Most of them quit wind symphony because they don’t like Dr. Ciepluch. He has the tendency to take everything way faster than it should go and play a ton of loud music without much contrast. He’s also the best BS’er I’ve ever met. With that said, he is a fairly good conductor and the groups at case all sound great, so he must be doing something right. I don’t know how well case would prepare you for a professional career. It depends on what instrument you play and how good you already are (I know a violinist who’s 17 who could probably make the cleveland orchestra tomorrow if she wanted to), but as a general rule if you’re looking to get into a big name professional orchestra or something of that nature you should definitely go to one of the big conservatories, NEC, Julliard, Curtis, Manhattan, etc. If you really want the combination of a degree in music and in another academic field, I’d recommend checking out northwestern, oberlin, and depauw.