Dreams of Piano, Where to even start?!

College Majors Music Major
1

I am the parent of a passionate young pianist. My daughter is a sophomore in high school. She attends a public high school that, while it has a decent music program, is more interested in churning out STEM students.

DD has daydreams of being a concern pianist. However, I think she is young and naïve in regards to her goals. (But my 7th grade son wants to be a major league baseball player…he can hang onto this dream for a bit). DD, while talented, is not on par with world class pianists.

That said, I believe it is possible for her to pursue a career involving her love of piano. But, I don’t know where to begin.

How do we develop a list of possible colleges or conservatories? It is overwhelming. I have found the top ten lists of music schools, etc. Needless to say the top ten would be a long shot in terms of both getting accepted and paying for it. So, we need a list that includes long shots, and sure things and everything in between.

In addition, the only award she’s ever won was Honorable Mention in a young composer’s contest in middle school. So, her resume needs to be sweetened up. But, I don’t know how to do this either.

Any and all advice is welcome!

2

Does she take private lessons? You may want to speak with her teacher if she does. Many teachers have connections to various conservatories and can offer advice. The awards are not really that important for conservatory auditions, really what happens in the room is the most important thing at most conservatory programs (not all, but most). She is young, so right now she should really focus on doing well in school and practicing as much as she can!

3

I suggest you read the Double Degree Dilemma by David Lane, which is posted above in this forum. It details different ways to study music.

BM in conservatory, or in a university music school, performance, composition or music ed are possibilities
BA music major in a college/university (with or without performance, most are academic majors with performance as extracurricular but may have performance elements in classes)
BA in something else with continued lessons, and participation in extracurricular performance
Double major: in a conservatory this could be piano and composition; in a college it could be any academic subject and music
Major/minor of music and something else, with music either the major or the minor
Double degree, usually 5 years, can be BA/BM or BA/MM (at a few schools, such as Harvard)

A BM will have 2/3- 3/4 classes in music. A BA will have 1/4-1/3 (or sometimes as much as half) of all classes in music.

Many colleges have excellent music departments (not music schools, departments: the “department” term usually means a BA program). She could choose a school based on size, location, academics and “vibe” and then look at the music department.

For a BA application, she could do a music supplement with a recording of her playing, a resume for music, and letter(s) of recommendation from teachers etc. But it is optional.

For a BM it is all about the audition for entrance into the music program. If it is a music school at a university she generally would need admission to both the university and the music school.

She will need to do some music outside of her high school, it seems. If she is interested in composition, then finding a teacher who teaches that along with piano is helpful, or find two teachers if you can afford it. Attendance at a conservatory prep is helpful if that is available in your area. Composition teachers can be found at universities, and some will work with a student online.

I don’t think you should worry about her resume for admissions purposes. Instead think about helping her develop her interests, independent of admissions, though of course any further development will help her choose a good fit. She still has more than half of high school ahead of her, to grow as a musician and as a person.

4

@compmom gave a really good rundown there, so I would take that information and do some google searching based off that understanding of what the different possibilities are. I also agree with @astute12 that you should consult with your daughter’s teacher, who will likely have a good idea of where she stands as far as schools she’d realistically get into in two years.

I hold a BM in piano performance and I was fairly late on the decision to major in music (decided at the end of my junior year and started prepping for auditions basically once that decision was made). If you have questions, feel free to message me or keep responding on this thread. I think it would be helpful to know what repertoire your daughter has played and is playing, what area of the country you live in/she would like to go to school in, and what other possible career paths she could see herself in that involve the piano other than being a concert pianist. There are still people today who are effectively concert pianists in the 20th century sense (ala Horowitz, Ashkenazy, etc), but even many of them at the very least give masterclasses or are artists in residence at top-tier conservatories. Your daughter is not necessarily disqualified from going on to reach the highest heights of the profession since lots of things can change once a student gets serious about the piano in college if they weren’t before. (I’ve seen this happen and to an extent it happened to me. If you told my music teachers when I was a senior in high school and was just learning what intervals were that I’d end up doing my masters at a top-tier conservatory, they probably wouldn’t have believed you.)

All that said, there are lots of other career paths one can have involving the piano, most of which are some combination of teaching and performing with ensembles. I hope this was helpful.

5

If you live anywhere near a college with a music department or conservatory it can be helpful to arrange a lesson with a professor and get an opinion on where your D is musically and what steps they might recommend going forward. You may also want to explore having your D attend a summer musical festival. That can give her an idea of what the talent level of other students is and where she fits in as well as help her see if she really enjoys that kind of full immersion in music, kind of a preview of what it’s like to be a music major.

6

I second the idea of getting an evaluation with a music professor. The conventional wisdom would likely reflect what you said, that your D compared to world class pianists isn’t there, etc, but the reality is you can’t really know that unless you have some sort of benchmark. If she was just starting piano, I would tell you it would be next to impossible to get to the level to be a concert pianist, it is so competitive! What it will come down to at this point is where she is technically and how far she would need to go to be able to get into a decent music school, which in turn comes down to the reperatory she has learned and how well she is playing it, and a music teacher at a college level or conservatory music program could tell you that. Generally but not always this level is a function of the number of years playing and also the level of instruction, too, a less demanding teacher even over a period of years may leave the student lacking technique or reparatory.

I think too it may be wise to start looking at what a concert pianist is and what that means in terms of jobs. True concert pianists like Lang Lang and Immanual Axe and Mitsuko are rare, but so are the big soloists, too, in any instrument, there are prob 2 dozen violinists in the world routinely playing with the big orchestras and such, on the level of Josh Bell, Kavakos and so forth. Some pianists do chamber music which is another avenue. Others these days are looking at collaborative piano, which trains them as accompanyists (and also obviously is good training for sonatas and chamber work)…obviously people with classical piano training end up doing things like playing in rock bands and the like, too, which is another possibility, or as a session musician (and I am not an expert on the piano world, so take this in the spirit it is offered). Obviously therre is teaching, most musicians seem to have a variety of things they do to get by…and if she does choose to major in piano performance, as other threads on here (and there are a lot of them) point out, musical training is still a bachelor’s degree and employers know that music training brings its own special skill set.

In the end to make a decision, you need to know where you are today. If she is a sophomore, that means she will have about a year and a half (fall 2018) to get ready for applications and pre screens, then 2 years it will be the actual auditions, so knowing where she is now gives you a much better idea of whether she could pursue this realistically. Also keep in mind that she doesn’t have to major in music to keep up with the piano, many colleges and universities have solid music programs for non majors, many of the elite colleges have pretty top level kids in the program,schools will pay for lessons, so she could do that, too, if majoring doesn’t look like a possibility, she still will have that to enjoy it, and even possibly find a way to have it as part of what she does…