Getting admitted to a music conservatory

musicprnt
Mon, 29 Nov 2010 12:53:15 +0000

Some really good points in this that I want to add to that hopefully will help:

-Admissions to conservatories are basically crap shoots, in that a lot of factors influence whether someone gets in or not. For example, it could be the year someone is auditioning on a particular instrument the program has very few slots open if any, so no matter how good they play they may not get in, even if playing at a level good enough to be admitted. And they might have for example 60 people auditioning for one slot, and if they had open slots all 60 might have gotten in, but they had to choose only 1…

Not to mention that admission to a conservatory performance program rests basically on the audition, it isn’t like admittance to academic programs where a wide variety of factors, including EC’s, test scores, grades, etc are factored into the mix. With a conservatory, it is all that one 10 minute (or less) audition, that is what it boils down to. Someone can be a fantastic musician, and have a bad audition, get nervous, freeze up, whatever. Things like competition wins, what summer program they went to, which youth orchestra programs basically don 't matter in conservatory admissions, though they do indicate a relative level of achievement.

The point being that with everything resting on that one audition and faced with the reality of the quirkiness of music school admissions if someone doesn’t get in it may only mean that given the openings they had at the time they auditioned, the person wasn’t in the top cut…but also keep in mind that more then a few of those who got in won’t make it in music, while someone who didn’t make the grade in that audition, went someplace else, does make it. Where you went to conservatory doesn’t get you gigs or jobs as a performer directly, orchestras don’t look and say “X went to Curtis, hire them”, it is done by audition and at that point it is the person’s talent and to a certain extent personality that gets them hired, and as a soloist all that matters is someone can go out and thrill an audience shrug

-If you daughter is younger then other kids going to conservatory, it probably won’t hurt her when she auditions from what I have been told by admissions people among others. If she has a college degree already, then that shouldn’t be a barrier (Curtis doesn’t even require a high school degree, kids as young as 10 have gone there and that is not a prep program, Curtis doesn’t have one, that is the main conservatory) as far as I know.

-On the other hand, if your daughter is still so young, what is the pressure to make it into conservatory right this moment? Why is this years audition do or die, make or break? Is the thought that she needs to get through conservatory as young as possible to be able to make it as a violinist? If so, that isn’t the reality.

If she has her heart set on getting into a high level program, and doesn’t get into the one she wants to this year, what would be wrong about taking another year to get to the level needed and re-audition? It might actually help her with an additional year to mature some more, physically and emotionally (no matter how bright a kid is, emotional development doesn’t necessarily match intellectual one).Older kids have been known to take a gap year to focus on their audition repertoire, so that should be an option.

She seems like a multi talented person, someone that no matter what she does will do fine, and if her heart is really in music, and considering she is still young, why not let her give it a shot, either this year or next year if she doesn’t get into what she wants to this year, and let it play out as it happens?

I also highly recommend reading the various links to threads that have been posted, and read the many posts on here about what a high level conservatory does or doesn’t do, it is important to get through the misconceptions out there (like for example, going to Juilliard or Curtis et al in of itself is the road to success, or that it gets you hired down the road for performance jobs, it doesn’t)