All other things aside, how much weight should be placed on the reputation of your music professor and school that you would attend? Does a well known excellent teacher yield more benefits as far as future career/graduate school success versus a lesser know excellent teacher?
It really depends on how you connect with the teacher. And if the studio is filled with high fliers, you might not have the opportunities that a slightly less well-known teacher and studio could bring. Some people will say that there are teachers who get their students into top grad schools. But there also are plenty of people from “second tier” studios who get into top tier studios for grad school.
What are you looking for in a teacher? Will you really get to study with the famous teacher, or will you be studying with a grad student most of the time? These might be some questions to ponder.
People will say that a teacher’s reputation isn’t important. And that is true to an extent–an excellent teacher that you connect with but who is not well-known is better than a famous teacher who is a bad fit. But having a teacher who is well-known and respected among his or her colleagues can have benefits. For one thing, the teacher is well-known for a good reason–she or he is probably an esteemed pedagogue and/or a highly respected performer. When you apply for opportunities such as certain summer festivals, you will be judged by your resume in addition to your recorded audition. In my experience observing this world, there are often many excellent musicians vying for a very limited number of places in, say, a festival. Truly, the administration could fill those few spots many times over with equally accomplished and capable players. At some point it stops being a pure meritocracy, and that is when it does matter what your resume says.
But there is no one-size-fits-all answer; some students enter conservatory with advanced skills; others need more hand-holding and technical work to bring their talents to fruition. If you are the latter, then it would likely make sense to pick the excellent, not-as-well-known teacher who will be able to help you get to the next level. In a famous teacher’s studio you might sift towards the bottom of the pack, as far as opportunities for advancement, etc. There are so many variables that this question can only be examined on a case-by-case basis.
Glassharmonica makes some valid points, that having a well respected/known teacher can provide some benefits. For one thing, he/she probably has a pretty wide network, and that can be valuable in finding out about things like summer programs (sadly, there are some pretty well known teachers who quite frankly, seem to live in a bubble and don’t know what is going on out there in the wider music world). A widely respected teacher, well known one, probably knows at least some of the teachers on the faculty at the grad schools, and they can help a kid towards knowing what they will need on an audition ("Oh, Vlad the Impaler teaches at the University of Transylvania? Better know the Schmeylovich variations on “Monster Mash”). And getting into a top studio can help drive a student forward, a well known teacher with a strong reputation probably attracts mostly heavy hitters, which in turn can be incentive (though as she rightfully points out, being in a studio like that can mean being near the bottom of the barrel, depending on the teacher, with things like being able to perform in Studio class and such, or perhaps getting extra time from a teacher, it all depends on the teacher).
Now there is the caveat about reputation of schools and teachers, and that is don’t rely on the broad impressions people have. There are a lot of people out there who will tell you that going to Juilliard or Curtis et al is “the only way to go”, that if you go there that writes the golden ticket to success, and that and 2.50 will get you a ride on the subway in NYC. There are facets to the reputation of a school helping, in some cases as GlassHarmonic pointed out it may help with let’s say admissions to a summer program , in the sense that the playing level because of the competition to get in there is uniformly pretty high, and if you ever want to be a private teacher telling parents you went to Juilliard, for example, because so many people have heard of it, isn’t going to hurt…but the downside is in believing things like rankings or what other people say is that because everyone says it is a great school, it will necessarily be great for you, and that isn’t true either. School’s reputations are not necessarily all that true, some of them rest on prior glory when these days a famous school may be resting on its reputation in the past. A school that I cannot argue is a great school like Curtis may not be a good environment depending on what a musician wants to do, Juilliard is an amazing place and there is a lot to be said for it as a school, it offers a lot, but it may not be great if you were studying certain instruments under certain teachers whom you wonder how they got to teach there.
The other factor with teacher’s reputations is if it is based on their career as performers, that may not be the best person to study with. There are some ‘great teachers’ out there on violin, for example, who were amazing performers, but from what I can tell they cannot really teach what made them great, they might be decent teachers, but what made them great as performers might be transcendent, that they cannot teach that because in a sense, they don’t know because it could be instinct with them.
In a nutshell, you have to look at the whole situation and say why is the person or school famous? If it is something like a USNWR ranking, or a ranking on Violin.com, or what a lot of people say, conventional wisdom, I would say don’t use it (USNWR is just plain stupid in its rankings), but if the reputation seems to be based on success with students, of tangible things that can be seen, then there can be reasons to go with a teacher with the big reputation.
As Glassharmonica pointed out, it really depends who the student is, where they are, that determines which of the two type of teachers is better, it depends on what they want to do and so forth as well.
I love it, musicprnt!