<p>I'm going to be a HS senior in the fall, and I had a few questions about auditions and schools. I've been browsing the forums for a lonnng time, but there's still some questions I'm unclear about :)</p>
<p>I'll number them to make it more organized:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>How many flutes does each conservatory/music school take? And how many audition usually? I'm very aware I play a highly competitive instrument (and very, very terrified!)</p></li>
<li><p>I know for some schools, the audition is the most important factor of being accepted or not. But for some, do your grades and scores weigh in heavily? For example Peabody, since it's connected to JH will I have to have JH level grades to be even considered? I also heard that it's somewhat weighted, but not nearly as heavily unlike like other majors applying.
(I'm an okay student. B+/B with almost all honors throughout, taking an ap and ib course this year. 1770 combined SAT. GPA is 3.2/3.88 unweight/weight)
I'm also asking this because I'm wondering if it would be worth it to retake the SAT. I scored 1770 on the first one, and I guess if I took it again I'd be in the 1800s-1900s range and I'm not sure if it would be even worth it, considering I have youth orchestra rehearsal and a woodwind chamber music school I'd have to miss.</p></li>
<li><p>This is my most fearful question- So, what happens if you don't get into any of the schools you've auditioned to? (I'm so extremely scared of this happening :() With the high competitiveness, I can see this easily happening... Do you just take a year off to practice more? Or...</p></li>
<li><p>This is more of a once you're in college thing, but if I did want to transfer to a different conservatory, is this possible? Or is it very difficult? </p></li>
<li><p>Prescreening DVDs. What kind of camcorder or recording devices would be the best? Would a $100-300 video camera suffice or should we get something more (or rent something)?</p></li>
<li><p>The audition dates. Are they usually during the week (when there's school) or on weekends? Or does it just depend when you schedule it? (Any extra info on audition dates and stuff are appreciated :D)</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Also, I was wondering if most conservatories are connected to liberal arts schools, because I plan on taking science courses to possibly go into optometry later.</p>
<p>Specifically, here's the list I'm looking at:
UMaryland
Temple
UMichigan
Rowan
Shenadoah
Hartt
Eastman
Peabody
Oberlin
BU
NEC
(I'm not audition to all of these, I'm just considering them at the moment)
And any other schools you'd like to suggest, please feel free! (I'm a flute, if you forgot :))</p>
<p>Thank you soooo much in advance.</p>
<p>Wow you have a lot of questions.</p>
<h1>1 A Boston University flute teacher told us they audition about 60 flutes and accept around 6. An Ithaca flute teacher told us they audtion about 100 flutes and accept 10-20 depending on the number they need in a particular year.</h1>
<h1>2 Every school is different about their admission requirements. Your SATs need to be higher for BU and Oberlin College (not to be confused with Oberlin Conservatory). They are fine for Hartt which is part of Univ of Hartford. I’m not familiar enough with the others to comment, but you should check each school’s website regarding admissions. You are correct that some conservatories have different grade/score standards than their host university (such is the case with Peabody/JH and Eastman/UofR)… but not all.</h1>
<h1>6 Almost every school has their 2011 audition dates posted on their websites by now with audition requirements. Usually they give you about three choices of dates, and they can fill up. You might not get your first choice.</h1>
<p>I think you need to spend some time on each school’s website and you will find all the info you need pretty quickly.</p>
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<ol>
<li> Most conservatories accept considerably fewer flutes than Ithaca. For example, Curtis accepts only as many flutes as it needs for its orchestra and probably has years in which it does not need any. Numbers will vary from year to year.</li>
<li> Since you specifically mentioned Peabody: my understanding is that for acceptance at Peabody, you do not need to meet the JHU academic standards. Peabody has been fairly transparent about what they require academically: they have a baseline that students need to meet in order to be successful in their theory/music history courses. I believe you exceed that baseline by a comfortable margin. For conservatories like Eastman and NEC, your academics are also probably fine. For university programs, you should check with the individual program. Given that you do have considerable room to improve your SAT, I would consider retaking it. Even for schools that claim it is a small factor, a score of 1950 would create an overall more favourable impression than a score of 1770.<br></li>
<li>As violadad mentions, include a couple of safeties that you would be happy attending. In music, a safety does not have to be an inferior program: some programs that are easier to get into, can have phenomenal flute instructors and other great opportunities (these less competitive programs, usually just do not have strong peer groups across all the instruments).<br></li>
<li>Remember that with the prescreening DVD, the sound quality is more important than the visual quality. While many schools insist that the DVD does not need to be professional quality, I would be reluctant to submit something that had bad sound, especially on an instrument as competitive as flute. Given the thousands you will likely spend on application fees, flights, gas, hotels, accompanists, etc., a couple extra hundred on a good DVD is probably money well spent–use the DVD as a Christmas gift for grandparents!</li>
<li> Many schools have choices of dates that involve both weekends and weekdays. The top conservatories tend to have most of their dates on weekdays (they do tons of auditions and there are 5 weekdays and only 2 weekend days). For some schools, dates are assigned on a first-come, first-served basis, so it helps to make your request early. At some schools the date request is part of the application. In other schools, the date request is a separate form.</li>
</ol>
<p>You asked for other suggestions: Given the geography of your choices, I would also suggest considering Cleveland Institute of Music. It is a first rate school (as good as or better than any of the others on your list) and is located on/next to the Case Western campus giving its students opportunities to take advantage of CWU’s excellent and varied academic offerings. I believe that CWU and CIM have a reciprocal agreement. If you are visiting Oberlin, you will probably go through Cleveland anyways.</p>
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<p>When checking out the details, try to find out how difficult it will be to schedule the lab sessions for the science courses that you mention. This will require digging pretty deeply into school websites to find actual class schedules and the graduation requirements for any degrees, majors and minors that you are considering. Often, science lab courses get scheduled at the same time as rehearsals for your mandatory ensemble. That can make a science major and a performance major very hard to combine at some schools.</p>
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<p>I am a flute performance major and just finished applying to about 10 schools last year for entrance into the Fall of '09. I sympathize with your fear about not getting in anywhere because that basically happened to me. First of all, I’d like to say that having a safety school is very important. Secondly, I’ll share my story about how I eventually found success. I applied to ALL great schools- NEC, Oberlin, Carnegie Mellon, University of Colorado, and then University of New Mexico as my safety (I’m from NM). I didn’t make the live audition at NEC, but did make it for Carnegie Mellon and CU. Oberlin I did a regional audition. At CM, Jeanne Baxtresser complimented me saying that my breath support was very good. Having finished everything except my excerpt, she asked me where all I was applying and then said “Well, you’re doing REALLY well.” I was very encouraged by that but didn’t get in. I didn’t even get into CU Boulder (they have a fabulous flute teacher there and I really wanted to go there). Finally, I was so exhausted that when I played my audition for my safety school, I played all the right notes but my tone wasn’t great and I didn’t get that much money. At moments like these, you have to search deep. What I realized was that I had applied to schools that were out of my league. (this is just my story). Here’s what I did: I applied to middle-of-the road schools using compilations of my pre-screening CD’s for a late audition. I found schools such as West-Texas A & M, where our local high school band director had connections to the flute prof and I got what they said was one of their highest scholarships. Then I remembered that at my regional audition for Oberlin in Colorado I had visited a beautiful campus at the Univ. of Denver and ended up applying there and getting a $28,000 scholarship! And now I’m there on a full ride, and I LOVE IT!</p>
<pre><code>I hope this gives you hope for “seeing beyond the bump” of that potential fate of not getting in to anywhere out of this world.
</code></pre>
<p>Quickly, I studied this summer with teachers from UMich, BU, and Eastman and loved them all. Amy Porter is amazing, she can transform anybody’s playing in minutes. Linda Toote was great with piccolo, intonation, and keeping her focus on a positive teacher/ student relationship. And Bonnie Boyd had a perspective of applying singing to playing the flute, and creating resonance on every note we play by finding ease/ relaxation and alignment in our body. </p>
<p>astewa57</p>
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<p>Thank you guys so much for your responses!! They’re truly so helpful.
Sorry I responded so late.</p>
<p>Can anyone suggest some safety schools for flute? Would UMaryland be more safety-ish or University or Oregon maybe? I’m having trouble finding safeties 
</p>
<p>@moopie19: what’s the difference of oberlin college and oberlin conservatory? I kinda thought they were like the liberal arts school + the conservatory together. Can I get into the conservatory and not get into the college and vice versa?</p>
<p>@violadad&violindad: Thank you for making everything more clear for me. I was told by another flute major on this site that there are technically no safety schools… but I didn’t really understand that. I think I’m going to see if my music school has any video recording devices first.</p>
<p>@bassdad: Thank you for that tip, I will definitely look deeper into the school scheduling.</p>
<p>@astewa57: Wow, your story was very inspiring to me. I’m very happy things ended up so well for you. It gives me hope to keep trying 
Thank you for sharing!</p>
<p>I’m switching teachers this september (to a member of the philly orch, so excited! :D), so hopefully he can give me an idea what league I’m in. And wow… so many musical dads on here! Haha.</p>
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<p>Oberlin College and Oberlin Conservatory are separate entities for admissions purposes, although they share a campus, dormitories and most other services. You can apply to either, or to both if you wish to be part of the Double Degree program. The College makes admissions decisions based on the usual academic criteria, although it takes a holistic approach rather than being completely numbers driven. Conservatory admission is very much based on an audition. I have heard members of the Conservatory admissions department say that the audition is about 80% of the decision, with the other 20% being an assessment of your ability to keep up in the electives you will take from the College - roughly one per semester. The College grants BA degrees and the Conservatory mostly grants BM degrees. The Double Degree program results in one of each (with the BA in a non-musical subject) and generally requires five years to complete.</p>
<p>It is possible to get a BA in Music through the College, but you cannot declare a music major on entrance. You need to do well in a couple of music classes first year, then audition toward the end of first year or at the start of second year. This audition will not be as hard as the one to get into the Conservatory, but neither will it be a piece of cake - particularly on a highly competitive instrument like flute.</p>
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<p>University of Maryland is not a safety school for anyone. It is very competitive. What people are saying is that no audition based program can be considered a safety. There are too many variables that you cannot control from how many spots are available to how many and caliber of the auditioning pool. </p>
<p>For our state our school and teacher knew which ones were easier however. Easier because they were more regional, took more, or they did not draw a large pool of high level talent, or they mostly focused on music ed so their was not as much competition for performance. You can try include an academic school with a BA for a safety or take your chances. DD took her chances. Her teacher had her pretty well pegged for admissions so it was not an issue. The easier admission places were ones she would have been happy with. She did manage to get into all of her places and had choices, but you cannot tell that ahead of time .</p>
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<p>I feel the anxiety of college auditions return just reading this thread!! 
We went through the two years ago with our youngest d. I will just give you a couple of our experiences and thoughts…
About CIM/Case. Yes…wonderful!!! D auditioned and was accepted to CIM…but then was wait listed at Case. (All honors, straight A’s, NHS, top 5% of her class…GPA 4.0 with a percentage CPA of 99%) Yep…waitlisted. SAT’s were good, not fabulous…that is what waitlisted her.<br>
As far as “safety”…is there really such a thing if you have to audition? D applied and auditioned to 7 schools and her acceptances were all over the place! There are schools that have HUGE flute studios…not what my d was looking for. She did not want a conservatory. She wanted a large school. Her choices came from teachers she worked with…and her top two schools were because of the flute professors, then the fact that the studios were limited in size (about 12-14 in the entire studio…undergrad and grad), playing opportunity and size of school. Top choices were U of Texas in Austin and U of Iowa. Both have incredible instuctors…both have limited studios, both had orchestras and bands only for music majors. Also chamber groups, masterclasses weekly. She knew she would be placed in a concert band or orchestra…or both. She is now at Iowa and loves it.<br>
Make sure your prescreening is of the best sound quality! I agree that they are more interested in sound than visual…
We found the audition schedule to be more difficult with our flautist than our older d who is music theater. With older d we traveled to NYC for a weekend and she was able to audition several schools! Younger d had to travel to a lot of the schools on specific days. Make sure you check the schedules closely. Some instrumental audition days do not auditon all instruments on that day! We found several regional auditions did not have flute offered. It could have been the schools we were looking at, but make sure you check.
I see Shenandoah is on your list! Older d just graduated from there, loved it. We felt the flute program was modern, contemporary and good. Younger d wanted to go the classical route.<br>
Best advise I would give is to take lessons with the professors. It not only gives you a feel, but the professor too. Not sure if this is merely a coincidence, but the schools d was accepted to were the ones she had worked with the professors…
I wish you the very best. Just remember…enjoy. You are doing what you love to do and you will end up where you should be.</p>
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<p>shenandoah is an EXCELLENT music school for flute- i adored the flute teacher there. i did not go there but i had to flip a coin between that school and the school i am attending because i loved them both so much.</p>
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