Choosing the Right College Degree
Conservatory or university? What type of music degree will prepare you for the work world?
By Louise Lee
April 2009
You’re a high-school senior, a great player, and want to be a musician for a living. Now for that prickly question: Where to go to college and what to study? Let’s fast-forward a few years. There is a good chance that as a working musician, you will do more than one activity. You’ll perform concerts (sometimes for money and sometimes not), and play weddings and other casual gigs. You’ll pursue one-off projects, maybe making a recording or organizing presentations at local elementary schools. You might teach in your home studio, a community music school, or at a college as a part-time adjunct.
The point is, you, like most other musicians, will likely assemble a portfolio career of activities, each with varying pay and time requirements.
Even if you’re aiming for a full-time orchestra job or university faculty appointment with a salary high enough that you don’t have to pursue other activities, you should keep in mind a few sobering statistics. There are more than 600 accredited degree programs in music in the United States, according to the National Association of Schools of Music. Every year, these schools together produce more than 10,000 music graduates, most of whom hit the job market. As for orchestra jobs, according to labor union the American Federation of Musicians, the top 50 big-city and regional orchestras represent about 4,500 full-time positions, about half of which are string positions. Every year only a few hundred slots come open, and auditions draw hundreds of applicants. Openings for full-time teaching jobs at universities and conservatories are rare.
None of these facts should discourage you from chasing those great full-time jobs. If there’s an audition for a spot in the Boston Symphony Orchestra or an opening for a faculty position at the Eastman School of Music, go for it!
In the meantime, though, you’ll need a lot of skills and other knowledge to get your career going. College will be a great time to keep sharpening your musical and performance abilities. But at the same time, you’ll have an opportunity to hone other skills that you’ll need after school. As a working musician, you’re a small business, and the product you’re selling is your musicianship and artistry. That means you’ll want to use your college years to develop, for example, your communication and critical-thinking expertise. Writing abilities in particular are crucial, since you’ll likely be writing everything from grant proposals and program notes to fund-raising letters.
“Many young musicians think, ‘I’ll never need them,’ but writing and communication skills are more important than they realize,” says Angela Myles Beeching, director of the career services center at New England Conservatory. You also might want to study areas that sharpen your analytical and organizational skills. You’ll use those as you handle finances for yourself or an ensemble, organize tours, or manage projects that may involve many people.
You’ll also want to develop your intellectual curiosity and broaden your general knowledge, both of which can make you a better musician. “Getting a broad education is studying other things than music,” says Robert Martin, director of the Bard Conservatory of Music, which requires its conservatory performance students to pursue a separate degree in a nonmusic area. “It opens the mind; it has an effect that’s hard to explain, but is observable.”
In practical terms, that also means studying the sciences, social sciences, and liberal arts. Only you, with advice from your parents and teachers, can decide what kind of college environment will help you best hone your analytical and communication skills, develop your curiosity about the world, and sharpen your musical ability all at once.
Here are some of your choices:
Music Conservatory
Examples: Juilliard, Eastman, New England Conservatory, Oberlin, Peabody, San Francisco Conservatory
You can pursue a BM, or Bachelor of Music, in performance. This is a “professional” degree, meaning that it’s designed to train you for a specific job, in this case, a job as a performer who also teaches and gigs.
You’ll have to audition to get into this kind of program, and once you’re there, you’ll study, well, music, music, something nonmusic, and music. For example, the San Francisco Conservatory requires that you take 75 percent of your credits in music-related classes and in your primary instrument. You take the rest in nonmusic electives, which include offerings in such areas as European literature and philosophy.
As you’d expect, conservatory programs have heavy performance requirements that include juries each semester, recitals, and group performances. With those performance requirements come massive practice, rehearsal, and private-lesson demands.
Pros: A conservatory experience is highly focused. Think total immersion. You’ll be surrounded by people with interests like yours and who can talk about quartets and concertos into the night.
Some students want to be surrounded by music and musicians, and conservatories are “the one kind of institution that will meet their needs,” says Richard Charwin, college counselor at Bernards High School in Bernardsville, New Jersey. “If you want total immersion, then that environment will support it. When you go to a conservatory, people don’t know where the football stadium is, and for many, it doesn’t matter.”
You might want this environment if you’re determined to audition for a top-five orchestra, since a lot of your competitors, including those from overseas, will have had this background, too. If you go to a conservatory where high-profile soloists studied, you’ll also have the benefit of that association. You’ll be sharing in the pedigree of some of those who have already “made it big,” thereby perhaps opening doors and creating opportunities down the road.
Cons: A conservatory experience is highly focused. You meet mostly other musicians who are pursuing performance degrees just like yourself. It’s possible that could get boring after a year. “There won’t be English majors wandering around, or math guys,” says Charwin. “You have to make sure you’re okay with that.”
If you decide when you’re 30 that being a musician for a living just isn’t for you, then you’ll have to sell your conservatory degree on the job market. That’s not an easy task. True, to earn a BM, you have to jump through many classroom and onstage hoops.
But people outside of music don’t always understand that.
“Parents of kids with roomfuls of music awards are deathly afraid of a BM,” says Lloyd Peterson, a counselor at consultancy College Coach in Watertown, Massachusetts, who works with high-school performing artists. “They’re terrified that at age 22, if you change your mind, what are you going to do with a BM? You can do a lot, but will Mr. CEO understand that in the job interview? What’s your hard-skill set? That’s what the human-resources department thinks.”
University with a Great Music Department
Examples: Northwestern, University of Texas, University of Michigan, University of Southern California, Indiana University, Yale
You can pursue a BM in performance. The experience will resemble that at a conservatory but with a few important differences. At a university, you’ll meet more nonmusicians. You’ll also be able to choose your liberal-arts electives from a wider range of courses.
Your classmates in those nonmusic courses probably won’t be musicians, so your European literature discussions might flare with passions about Proust that only Euro-lit junkies bring to the table.
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