Not majoring in music

“I want to be a flute major. Which college should I go to?” This is the kind of question that I often see asked on internet message boards, Facebook groups, and email threads. If you’re asking that question and people are giving you lists of schools, you probably shouldn’t take them too seriously. And if you’re answering someone else’s question by tossing out a recommendation, you might reconsider whether this is really helpful.

Interest in studying a subject isn’t nearly enough for anyone to give a reasonable recommendation of a college, university, or conservatory. Even a fairly detailed history of your prior teachers, repertoire studied, and competitions won probably only scratches the surface. Internet strangers are often happy to tell you what their favorite schools are, and many of them are probably genuinely high-quality programs. But if 20 people answer, you will probably get nearly 20 possibilities.

Here’s my best general advice for choosing a college for your music studies.

• Consult your current private teacher. If you don’t have one, strongly consider getting one. (You will probably be competing for admissions and scholarships against people who have one!) This person is probably the one best suited to offer recommendations based on actual knowledge about you and about the wider world of your instrument.
• Especially if you are planning to study music performance, the teacher of your instrument will be the most important figure in your college education. In a perfect world you would get to meet a bunch of flute (or whatever) professors, spend some time with each of them, take a lesson or two, and figure out who you like best, and then apply to the school they teach at. There’s a chance you have already encountered some of the nearby ones, maybe at a masterclass, a Flute Day, or when they visited your high school (to meet and recruit students like you!). If you’re able to do some travel, some others might be able to make time to meet you. At the very least, see if you can find recordings on YouTube or their personal or school website and see if they are someone you would like to learn to play like.
• If you don’t already have some schools in mind, start nearby. If you live in the US, there is probably a state university that is sort of an unofficial flagship for music, and you won’t have to pay out-of-state tuition. These universities aren’t always the most nationally-known, name-brand music schools, but they generally have outstanding faculty and students, beautiful facilities, and everything else a large state school can offer. You probably won’t go wrong.
• If your financial means and/or scholarship potential give you some more flexibility on location, great! You can add to your list your picks of the 50 flagship state-school music departments, or private universities or conservatories.
• If you have some more specific goals about where you want to go, then definitely apply for those schools. But also have one or more solid backups. I auditioned at one school against 60 other players of my instrument. They only had room to accept 4 that year, so lots of very talented people didn’t get in. If you can fall back on a good state school, you will still get an excellent education, probably cheaper.
• If you have reasons to stay close to home, accrue less debt, or maybe seek out a program with less stringent admissions, there are lots of small, regional universities (like mine!) that offer excellent educations. There’s a good chance that your nearest one has talented faculty, good ensembles, and lots of opportunities to learn. If they offer an accredited major in music, they will be able to offer all the classes and experiences you need for a quality music education, but they may lack some of the extras offered in a larger program.

Choosing a college is a big decision, but there are lots of high-quality options, and some of them are probably near you and relatively affordable. Good luck!

• Classical or jazz solo artist, chamber/orchestral/theater musician, jazz big band or small group musician, studio musician. None of these “require” a college degree, just very fine playing. But these are lofty goals for making your primary living—very few people, even among the most talented and hardworking, are able to achieve them. But college study can help you develop the skills, the discipline, and the professional network that might get you there. And a college degree that you can fall back on for other employment might be a smart move.
• Musician in “popular” styles (such as rock, blues, hip-hop, country, and many more). Even if you wish to study these in college, there currently aren’t a lot of options. But some classical or jazz training in a band or orchestral instrument, widely available at universities, will deepen and expand your musical understanding in general, and sometimes present valuable opportunities.
• Public school music teacher. Yes: in most cases you will need a bachelor’s degree in music education.
• University music teacher. Yes: in most cases you will need a doctoral degree in something related fairly precisely to the job you are applying for. (Some job listings list a masters degree as a minimum, but even for an adjunct or community-college position, you may well be applying against candidates with doctorates.)
• Private music teacher, from home or small business. You probably won’t need the degree in order to set up shop, but depending on your local market and your reputation it may be an advantage in attracting students and giving them quality instruction.

While college study may not be the right choice for every instrumentalist, it’s hard to beat for a well-rounded musical education (with performance study, music theory, music history, and more), plus life skills, networking, and enhanced employability in the general job market.

I’m a music professor, and I find there are sometimes disconnects between the music faculty and the faculty in other departments. Of course not every institution is the same, and even areas of concentration within music can have differing roles and expectations, but here’s what sometimes surprises my non-music colleagues about my particular job:

• Most of my teaching is one-on-one. In my “applied” music teaching, students (mostly music majors) come to my office weekly for private lessons in playing their instrument. One side effect of that is that I put in a lot of contact hours with students for the amount of teaching load credit I get. (I once had a colleague in another department ask to schedule a meeting on one of my “non-teaching” days, a luxury I do not have.) A flip side is that I’m grading these lessons as they are happening, so I rarely have stacks of papers or assignments or exams to grade.
• I’m pretty specialized. I have the expertise to teach an instrument (actually, in my individual case it’s a few, but that’s unusual), and I wouldn’t be a very effective teacher of most of the other instruments, which I can’t play much or at all. Well-staffed music departments often have a separate teacher (or even more than one) for every instrument (including voice). For that reason, music departments tend to have a fairly high faculty-to-student ratio.
• Much of my value to my department has to do with my “studio,” the group of students who I teach one-on-one. To be seen as contributing appropriately, I need to maintain a full and vibrant studio. At a small school like mine, that means it’s an ongoing priority to find and recruit prospective students, often by traveling to high schools and community colleges in the region. I’m not just looking for music majors in general, but particularly for students who play what I teach. Failure to keep my studio full could ultimately result in the value of my position being called into question.
• The students in my studio take lessons from me not just for a semester, but for the duration of their degree programs. That means I get to know them well, see them at their best and their worst, and see their development in detail over the course of several years. It can be a close teacher-student bond, or sometimes a more strained relationship. Since at my institution I’m also the academic advisor for my studio, I’m monitoring most aspects of their academic progress, professional development, and even personal wellbeing pretty closely.
• I don’t work directly with some of the most publicly visible aspects of the music department, such as the marching band. The musical groups that have broader audiences (especially because of their association with university athletics) sometimes seem to take on outsized importance in the public’s minds, relative to the arguably more academically important performances by student soloists and concert-hall-type ensembles.
• Publishing scholarly papers isn’t how I prove my academic bona fides. Music professors with some more academically-oriented specialties like musicology or music theory might do that. But since my area is music performance, I build my reputation by, well, performing. My annual faculty recitals, presented on campus, are a major component of that. Things like playing in a nearby symphony orchestra count, too.
• Performance is a serious, rigorous academic activity. I spend months practicing for multiple hours a day before putting on an hour-long solo recital. To make it a worthy academic achievement requires playing challenging music, generally mostly or entirely music I’ve never performed before. Even selecting the music requires a great deal of expertise, including consideration of factors including overall theme, variety of styles and historical periods, pacing, performance factors like fatigue, and inclusion of music by a diversity of composers. And the printed sheet music provides only skeletal instructions for performance—I will have to make thousands of interpretive decisions, weighing historical performance practices, traditions specific to the instrument and to the individual pieces being performed, the interactions and balances between separate pieces of music, the approaches of any collaborating musicians, the response of the audience, and my individual performing strengths and weaknesses.
• Similarly, the music and performance opportunities I select for my students and student ensembles are part of a larger educational purpose, which doesn’t always align with public tastes. (I direct the university jazz ensemble, and I have gotten comments from audience members who want to hear Glenn Miller on every concert, and who are unflinchingly candid in their opinions of the “modern” big band music that I also generally include. For educational reasons, I want the students to study and perform in a variety of styles.)
• I work a lot of weekends and evenings. Not so much grading papers, but performing, and attending and evaluating my colleagues’ and students’ performances.
• And, finally, because what we do in the music department is so different from what our colleagues in other disciplines do, we spend a fair amount of time justifying it. Administrators, tenure and promotion committees, and others might look at a spreadsheet of academic journal publications or credit hour production, and assume we aren’t getting much done, or might view a recital performance as just playing some music for fun. There’s an ongoing need to explain the importance, value, and academic rigor of our work.

Check your music department’s website, and stop by to hear a colleague perform or teach!