Help - To Major In Music... Or Not

musicprnt
Wed, 24 Jun 2015 16:34:26 +0000

As others have said, there are plenty of options. The Ivy league schools, for example, though they don’t have performance degrees, they do emphasize their music programs (orchestra, chamber) and at least several of them (if not all of them) I believe offer lessons as part of tuition (you would need to check that). I know for a fact that schools like the Ivies tend to lend weight in admissions to talented musicians (as do other top colleges and such), so you wouldn’t find a musical drought at many of them…

The one thing to keep in mind is as compmom said, the dual degree program (generally BM and a BA/BS) is a 5 year deal, and it can be very, very time consuming doing both. Likewise, the joint programs, like Peabody/Johns Hopkins , NEC/Tufts, NEC Harvard have their own difficulties, the complaints I have heard are things like getting to the various campuses (like Peabody/JHU), and coordinating schedules (NEC/Harvard doesn’t have the big problems with coordination, since it is a 5 year program where you get the bachelor’s from Harvard and the MM from NEC, the only real overlap can be in the 4th year if you are still finishing your bachelor’s degree).The joint program downside is that they don’t admit a lot of kids into them relatively, I have seen kids who were music superstars and academic superstars get turned down from the joint programs (I am talking things like Columbia/Juilliard, NEC/Harvard, NEC/Tufts, not dual degree programs).

A lot of kids go to programs like Vanderbilt or U Michigan or Northwestern if they want to do a true dual degree from what i can gather because it is easier there to coordinate among other factors (doesn’t hurt that those are top notch academic schools and strong music schools as well).

It sound to me like you do have a lot of choices, and what you do in the end will be how you see music. If you want to do the academic degree but want music for enjoyment you could go to let’s say an ivy or similar school, take lessons, do music ensembles, and then afterwords decide you want to pursue an MM, because you can do high level music at those schools. You could do a BA music/BA or BS in an academic field, the BA has a bit less time in the music, which leaves more for the academic, or you could do a dual degree (if available)…it is nice to have options, and the nice part all three of these ‘alternate’ routes to a BM degree alone can lead to staying in music after undergrad.