Thanks for all these responses! I lost my thread in a sea of tabs researching all these programs… I will check out Loyola and also put Brown on our list - his the mark in the northeast and i would be delighted for him to be in such an intense academic environment (my wife and i are wesleyan alum and sadly accepting that their music program is a little too limited for him) - but unless the music department at Brown has some sway over admissions, AND found his portfolio to be worth fighting for, I think that’s probably not realistic for him (95.7 WGPA/1440 superscored SAT).
Budget - we can pay for much if not all of a private tuition. But there will be not a cent left for grad school or any other support. If he went to say SUNY, we might be able to help him with, eg, grad school or give a boost as he tries to get his band off the ground or something. And, honestly, we’re not sure we are WILLING to pay for Berklee. The for profit certificate-style programs are a real turn off to us; I don’t trust that the school has the student’s best interests at heart, from what I’ve seen and read, it seems like their profit is the motivating drive.
He does have a portfolio - there is a piece writing in an MSM program in traditional composition, it’s a theme and variations in a roughly romantic style, that veers in to playful/even goofy in the variations, for piano and strings. A second piece was written in a Tanglewood summer program - an electroacoustic composition that is quite experimental to my ears – not to say he’s broken the mold but rather that it is not traditional tonal melodic music, more of a soundscape; his third piece is a sweet baroque duet he wrote and performed with his cello teacher. He’s in a new music class now, at school, but may not have finished work in time for portfolios - definitely not for any early applications - and he also has some DIY recordings of his punk band. Which we would include on a linked page of his work but not as a piece of a portfolio.
He has done only little jazz - a few remote summer courses during pandemic, and he’s in an improv ensemble now at school.
“Contemporary guitar” - it is hard for me to pin that down. He’s learning jazz but also pop/rock/blues, and he does not profess to want to do “song writing” but having also eliminated every other genre as his main focus, it is really hard for me to say. If he auditions on guitar anywhere, it will be jazz. (eg for berklee).
So you can see from this list of interests but also what he says he doesn’t want to do - doesn’t want to be just classical, doesn’t want to be just electroacoustic, doesn’t want to do songwriting, and has said in the past he doesn’t want to do jazz, though that could be a symptom of being not proficient enough to be competitive for a specialized/conservatory program where he’d be applying to ALREADY be good at it . . . this leaves us with almost nothing in our sweet spot. Which has led us to consider BA programs where he would have the flexibility to experiment but in almost every case when we look at the course offerings/major requirements for BAs he finds they don’t offer as much as he wants! Bard and SUNY Purchase look promising to him; I liked Tufts and Carnegie Mellon but he did not; Oberlin is a maybe bc he isn’t sure which program would best capture his interests, and then we have a long list of maybes . . .
I appreciate everyone’s thoughts on this, and sorry for vanishing! I’m simultaneously working on high school and middle school apps for our younger two kids, here in NYC where they don’t have zoned schools past elementary - it’s a heavy lift!!
THANKS!
1 Like