missing academics with BM

BassDad
Fri, 25 Feb 2011 15:22:09 +0000

In music, it is usual for the student to arrange a sample lesson with one or more teachers. In many cases, expect to pay for this at the teacher’s private lesson rate. This is normally done by contacting the teacher directly, not the department or the college. You may be able to arrange a short conference at no charge, but having the sample lesson gives you a much better feeling of what it would be like to study with that teacher. Music undergrad is a lot more like grad school in other disciplines in that you really want to make a decision based on a specific teacher because you will be working one-on-one a lot.

In other fields, you can do pretty much what you did at UM.

You can audition into some graduate music programs from other majors, but you are likely to be competing against people who have spent the last four years (including summers and breaks) practicing 4-5 hours per day, playing with lots of ensembles and studying very specific orchestral excerpts that are known to be popular for grad school and professional auditions. Competition on piano or violin is particularly tough. You may also have a fair amount of music theory and music history to catch up on if you did not get those in undergrad. It is not a matter of keeping up music on the side because that is not going to cut it at a grad school audition. It is a matter of devoting a lot of extra time that you may not have while studying another subject. While there are exceptions, those who do a double degree program generally take at least five very busy years to get through it. Auditions for grad school generally require at least one large scale piece to be memorized, which can be very time consuming, and there is a lot of traveling involved for auditions. Music schools know this is going to happen in senior year and allow for it. Science or Enginering departments do not in most cases.