Determining Safety/Match/Reach for specific instrument

bridgenail
Mon, 22 Feb 2021 17:59:48 +0000

I’ll add 3 comments to the excellent information given above.

1.) Safety/match/reach is different for music. You may be rejected from a safety (unless you have a contact that knows you are truly interested) because they will assume that you will be accepted elsewhere. Your big in-state public may not do that…as they understand you may go in-state. But an LAC could reject you as a “non-match” bc you are mostly likely to go elsewhere. Most schools will ask for the list of schools that you are applying to. You don’t want to over-analyze or game the system, you simply want to answer honestly. The positive side of this…it’s pretty easy for professors and good music teachers to “know” where you should be auditioning. It’s NOT a mystery. So engaging with professors or teachers really helps.

I like how @mom2amazingkids did their list. Note there is no right way to do it…but if you are the “practical sort who doesn’t know anything about music” (that was me) their approach makes a lot of good sense.

IMHO, finding good “musical matches and connections” is what you want to focus on (with of course a financial safety).

2.) You have a secret weapon: YOUR KID! Besides working with the teachers (discussed above), engage your kid in this process. The funny thing is: students often have a pretty good sense of where they belong. Your son should be encouraged to watch performances at schools online. Students don’t want to embarass themselves at an audition nor do they want to spend time applying to a school that does not inspire them muscially. He may not say so directly (sometimes they hold their cards close)…but if you watch his behavior over time…you may see a lack of interest for one school and a ferverish approach to another. So he should be encourage to spend time learning where peers go and watching the performances of students online…he should be able to know if he “fits” or not. The hard thing is sometimes TRUSTING your kid…when you can’t trust him to remember to pick up milk…eventhough you have texted him 20 times. Believe it or not…he’ll get this right.

3.) If he doesn’t have a program or a competitive school with a few kids going on to good music schools, you really should consider a visit/or zoom with an in-state professor or other profession on his instrument for a consultation to get an idea on schools…as suggested above.

Once you know the appropriate school level to consider, you can then move on to “which” school, studio/teacher etc. The number of openings is really hard. While certainly useful if you can get it…the best thing, alternatively, is to have strong matches to the programs(even if they are reaches) and hopefully a trail lesson contact…bc that will get you considered (and you have to give the number of slots open up to the music gods…in other words, not worry about it).

In the end, you may find out that…really…there are only a handful of match/reach schools, maybe 6 to 8 if you are lucky. But if you have done your homework and done trial lessons, that’s all you need.