Combined BA/MM program or music major + science

deorwine
Wed, 01 Jun 2005 20:04:40 +0000

I have known two people who did a physics-music joint concentration (not counting the physics musical guy mentioned above-- how cool is that!). Physics does not require a thesis for its honors concentration, so physics/music is easier than most random joint concentrations, as your thesis doesn’t actually have to involve physics. It’s still pretty annoying, in the sense that you don’t get too many electives.

However, I don’t know anyone, including yo-yo ma, who did a performance major at Harvard, partially because there are no performance classes at harvard, unlike other schools. All the serious musicians I knew did music simply as an extremely demanding extracurricular. (I think this might have been before this NE Conservatory program, though? Or maybe they were just really really quiet about their conservatory work…)

(By the way, this is something I think is awesome about Harvard-- often the most serious passion in a student’s life, the thing that he or she is spending and will spend his/her life on, is not the dry academic thing being studied.)

The link posted above makes it sound like a joint concentration is not at all necessary as long as the student takes basic music theory. This makes a lot of sense to me, as to my knowledge the harvard music concentration is mostly musicology-oriented.

If it were my life, whether or not I was in the NE program, I’d major in physics, take the necessary music classes, spend all the rest of my time practicing and performing, and figure out what to do from there. I don’t think there’s any point in also declaring music unless you’re really interested in the musicology as well. If you’re interested in physics and vocal performance, then why complicate matters by having to study a third subject on top of that?