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Music Scedule Help
hinkus333
Registered User new member
Registered User new member
i am a junior, i am picking my senior classes, and i need advice. i signed up for a class that i can use to go to the middle school and help out a band class there. if i get that class, i have one slot left, and i have 3 classes i want to take. i could take begginers guitar, concert band to take a new instrument (pit or woodwind), or chior (to help singing). i do not know which one will help me best if i do want to be a music major. help the junior.
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Voice will generally help you in any music major, as you will be likely required to take classes to learn to sight-sing as part of your degree.
If you're going for a music education degree, then having broad experience in several instrumental disciplines will help you a lot. You will also likely be taking "methods" classes for each instrument as part of your degree, that is you will take classes to learn the basics of each instrument class (brass, woodwind, percussion, strings). Already being able to play a couple of different instruments would give you a leg up.
If you're going for music theory towards a wish of being a composer, guitar would most likely be a good companion for that.
*I don't recommend music performance because my own BA is in that. I didn't realize that I wasn't really that interested in being a performer for a living until my senior year of college. I also already knew before then that music performance doesn't really pay that well. If you get a music degree, get it to be an educator. If you want to be a performer, just start performing and get a degree in something else. Of course even though I say this, I wouldn't trade my time at music school for anything. I really did get to do a lot of cool stuff that I don't regret.
Ultimately though, none of those options are bad. If you really want to learn a new instrument, do that. If you really want to learn guitar, do that, and if you want to sing, do that. Any amount of learning other music stuff helps music stuff. Also, there's very little in the way of knowledge that you absolutely need to pick up in high school that you won't be able to pick up in university(unless, like, you want to major in Clarinet performance and can't identify a Clarinet). You don't have to worry that if you don't play guitar going into Uni, then you'll be behind, or anything like that.
Edit: I take issue with this part. If you want to be a music educator, get a music degree to be an educator. Do not just go to school to be an educator because that's the "right" music degree. If you're interested in music performance, go ahead and get that performance degree. You're not locking yourself out of anything else later on(Unless I guess you decide you really want to be a schoolteacher after Uni and also can't go back to get the education stuff done), and if it's what you want to pursue, then you should pursue it.
But literally 100% of that post is solid gold.
Counterpoint: A performance degree doesn't require very much that other music degrees don't, and other music degrees give you a LOT more non-performance credit than a performance degree does.
Basically you can be a professional performer without a performance degree, but it would be much more difficult to be an educator without a music education degree. If you wanna be a performer you can elect to take the extra level or so of (probably) private instruction to get what you would be required to have as a performance major. Both education and performance are likely to require the same level of music theory.
Add to this that I never met a professional orchestral performer who didn't give private lessons on the side to supplement income. Certainly you don't need a teacher's certificate for that, but it doesn't hurt.
Education also requires an absolute bonkers amount of extra stuff that other degrees don't, that are pretty much tuned to, you know, being an educator. A music education degree isn't a catch-all degree for people who are interested in music, it's a specific degree for people who are interested in music ed.
I think it's absolutely crazy-pants to say that even if you're not planning on being a teacher, you should go for a music ed degree. If we really want a "Get this degree if you're interested in general music but not in any aspect of it" degree recommendation, then I would say Musicology, Music History, or Music Theory are majors that are more expansive in terms of the greater theory and study of the art than a performance degree in terms of the study of the field, And even then I would say that's bum advice, unless you're interested in Musicology, Music History, or Music Theory.
Look, I spent 5 years as a professional performer without a performance degree, I know that a performance degree is not absolutely required to be a performer. I would say if someone wants to be a performer, but is also interested in studying other aspects of Music, or music as a broader field, then they should probably take lessons, double-major, or take a minor in performance, and then study the field they find interesting. But if someone wants to be a performer and wants to spend their time pursuing their mastery of their instrument, then performance is absolutely the degree to get, and recommending that they spend a semester doing student teaching when they have no interest in teaching, and that they take a heavier schedule so that they can learn correct techniques to properly care for elementary school voices, that they will never ever ever ever need to use or think about at all is insane to me. It's the easiest way that I can think of to get someone who isn't interested in being a teacher to completely burn out and have a really unpleasant uni experience. And while it can be overcome, it does in fact put them on lower footing in terms of technique and mastery of their craft than focusing on mastery of their craft would. So they'd be stuck learning extra stuff that they don't care about, and they'd have to go out of their way more to learn what they wanted to learn all along.
For the record, while yes, most professional performers also give lessons for income, I have never met another professional performer who has an Ed degree. Maybe they're there, but I've met more performers with Music Business degrees than Music Education. It's such a specific and specifically tough degree that the people who actually stick with it tend to really know that they want to teach music.
You should study the thing you want to study, and avoid getting a "safe" degree that you have no intention of using and won't enjoy getting. I mean, let's face it, if you really want to go the "safe" or "backup" option, then get an Engineering degree and play on the side.
And now I'm pursuing an MFA in interdisciplinary arts, focusing on interactive Generative Media(especially music), using Games for the interaction and means of setting parameters. So I tend not to do all too much in the way of performance these days.
Though in counter to my own arguments, I actually do know of one young woman who was in the same graduating class as myself in high school and went to the same music school that I did. While I took my music performance degree to be a telecom analyst, she too hers to be an opera singer in Vienna. She's even used her second instrument, the trumpet, in some of her performances. So it's absolutely possible to take a music performance degree to follow your passion. It's just that for myself, I probably should have thought harder about how much work I was actually willing to do on my own to be able to be a performer.
Edit: And because I can never help marveling at what an incredible badass she is, here is the girl I went to high school and college with, on stage as both vocalist and solo trumpet in the same song:
To say though that if you have the passion to perform that you should perform is.... misguided I feel. You can learn a ton about performance in university(I know I did!), and if you're not at a professional level, you can develop that while also getting a degree. And a degree is an important thing to have. Plus, there's a lot of important development as a performer during the University years that's important for performers to get. I got mine in a roundabout way by not being a performance major, but if I had tried to leave high school to immediately enter the world as a performer, I would've failed terribly. I didn't have the musical maturity to do that shit. Heck, even when I was performing, there remained performers that were way better than me technically who had really worked on their instruments to a level that I hadn't, because when I was learning, I was focusing on stuff I was better at and enjoyed more. The girl in that video 100% could not sing like that out of high school, having a space to focus on perfecting her craft helped her, well, with her craft. I've heard a lot of semi-trained singers, and that is a trained voice.
Plus, University is just kind of amazing in general, if you know how to use it and follow your interests. Like you can explore all the stuff you want to explore, you're getting a degree where a degree is generally a useful thing to have, and you get to have all the fun university experiences. It's a time where you can focus on bettering yourself in a way that no job will let you do.
If you, personally, completed a performance degree and decided that you no longer were enjoying it, then that's fine. If you have a job in another area, then that's great. And your degree probably gave you a lot of skills that helped with that transition(For instance, if you have a performance degree, you've probably had many a night where you take naps between practice sessions to make sure you nail that one etude, which transfers just fine to staying up and studying the stuff for whatever other job you want). Yeah I've also got the friends who took their music degrees and went on to become hair stylists, social workers, functional programmers, one UN translator even, whatever. Hell, in a way I'm taking my music degree and aiming at becoming a game developer. But I'm still in music, and a lot of my friends are still in the area that they got their degree, which includes performers, educators, theoreticians, composers, and audio techs.
If your advice was "Make sure you seriously want to pursue Music for at least 4 years before committing to this", or "Make sure that your area of study reflects what you want to spend your university years doing", or "A music degree will not earn you a bunch of money doing that music degree", then I'd agree. "Do a music degree if you're passionate about it, but don't necessarily expect your life to be a straight arrow from degree to fame and fortune" would get full agreement from me.
But "If you want a music degree, get it to be an educator" is setting up for a really shitty uni experience unless the person wants an ed degree.
Ultimately, I just think recommending a degree other than "The degree you want" is just a little weird. And nobody ever in the history of the world has ever said "Boy, those 4 years I set aside to do nothing but improve on the thing I am most interested in were a mistake".
I may have gotten a lot of experience as a performer by just performing, but playing a Jimmy Buffet song for the 4,000th time to pay the bills didn't make me any better at Piano, while spending an entire year working on a few Chopin etudes did.
I'm not saying "Get a performance degree", because, like, yeah, if you don't want that, then don't get it. I'm just saying "get the degree that you're interested in". You can always change midway through, you can always complete a Bachelor's and decide that you want to go for a Masters in a related but different field, you can always get employment in a field you didn't necessarily get your bachelor's in.
Also Music Education is exactly the last place that someone who is generally interested in Music, but not sure in which way, or is trying to be safe, should look. Hell, get a Comp degree or something, you apparently don't need to be good at writing music to get one of those.
That lady in the video? I remember what she sounded like singing an aria with the youth orchestra in high school. And I remember what she sounded like doing operettas and operas with the university. At neither age was her voice as polished as her voice in that video. Yes, her voice now is a result of vocal training, but that's one-on-one training. Private lessons with a vocal coach. A music performance degree makes those lessons a mandatory part of your degree, but you can get those lessons just by themselves. It's the fact that she's been having vocal lessons since she was 16 that gives her the trained voice, not the degree in music performance.