Dual thread: Which Major is less risky?

College Majors Music Major
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<p>It appears that no one realized that this was supposed to be “joke thread”. At this time of year, we could all use a little levity but this is an area where it’s easy to misunderstand things even when it’s made clear. If I came down hard, I apologize.</p>

<p>Glad to know that your D is making choices! There are a lot of kids who don’t, or who have parents who are totally clueless and try to reduce everything to the bottom line $$.
An awful lot of those come my way and it takes quite a bit of hard work to help the families understand that the economic pay off might not come as quickly as they’d like. This is even harder when the girl or boy has been lauded with leads in school shows and won local competitions and then runs smack into reality when they find themselves competing for admission against dozens of other kids with the same qualifications! TV shows condense time, giving them a skewed perception of reality and illustrate instant stardom. And there really ARE people who don’t understand the difference in voice types needed for different majors or that extensive study is required. Just read an article yesterday about the casting of the Les Mis movies: it was about Amanda Seyfried playing Cosette. The writer (actually, this was the 2nd article and her bio says the same thing) pointed out that she was eminently qualified for this role “because she had studied opera when she was a teenager”!! She is 26 years old and she “studied opera” when??? My point is that there are folks that think it is just that simple. There are days that it all really scares me!
Bottom line is that I didn’t mean to be the downer on the thread, but I do want others who may come across this to stop, think, know that there is no easy path to the end and to work with their kids to make choices. It’s also important for singers to be realistic about their abilities and to remember that they are still pretty much at the beginning of the path while their violinist room mate might have already embarked upon a professional career. All things in good time…</p>

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<p>It is hard to tell what is a ‘joke’ and what is real online, and I am not surprised people answered literally, as I did. From my perspective, there are too many who ask these kinds of questions quite literally, people asking ‘which instrument is easier to make it in music’ and so forth. </p>

<p>More seriously, the three forms of music are different, but one comment I saw kind of got to me:</p>

<p>“other than the pop-opera stars have amazing natural tallent that those who took years to get where they are don’t naturally have.”. I am not sure what you mean by pop opera stars, do you mean when Sarah Brightman or Andrea Bocelli perform, or are is this about some of the younger performers on the opera stage who critics and stuff are grumbling about (maybe because they actually have someone playing Carmen who could be a sexy gypsy, rather then a 250 pound ingenue belting it out…). If it is Sarah Brightman et al, they aren’t opera singers, they are singing Operatic arias and it is quite different. There is nothing wrong with that, Operatic arias are music after all and music is re-interpreted, played in different styles, etc, all the time. That said, they aren’t ‘singing opera’ so to speak, and they would have serious problems on an operatic stage. Sarah Brightman did have vocal training I believe, and was on the stage with Phantom and such, but she also tends to sing amplified and is singing arrangements of those arias. I doubt she could go on the stage of the Met and sing the kind of roles that Renee Fleming and Joyce Di Donato and Anna Nebtrenko sing, their voices probably wouldn’t last half an opera, not to mention a run. </p>

<p>I think what really got me was ‘they go by on natural talent, while opera singers who didn’t have the talent get it by working longer’. The reason opera singers take time to develop and make there way to performing is because to do Opera the way it is done, you need those years to let the voice develop, specifically to learn how to sing which allows for longevity, it is very easy to blow out the vocal chords, and to build the endurance needed. The Sarah Brightman’s et al use amplification, and when they are in the studio or live they are using mixers and many of them use auto tune as well. BTW, that isn’t a knock on what they are doing, I was really ****ed off when the English guy did an opera aria on “Britains Got Talent” and all the critics and such were going nuts, it is something totally different. </p>

<p>As far as pop music goes, quite frankly most of it doesn’t require that much talent, most of the pop singers out there are more products of marketing and the geniuses in the recording studio then the performers, it is why pop concerts are more spectacle then performing. Yes, there are some pop singers who can sing live, but most of them are either lip synching or singing through gear that corrects a lot (some can, Kelly Clarkson actually has a voice underneath the pop recording massaging). </p>

<p>I am not exactly going to disagree about problems with music training, with the music business and so forth, there are a lot of problems, in some ways they still live in the world of yesterday when record companies and agents and orchestras and such abounded…however, to say that performance degrees are a crock and so forth, is to misunderstand what they are about IMO. If you mean the idea that anyone coming out with a performance degree is going to be good enough to get a job that is crap. On the other hand, if you are talking a lot of music out there, that is actually made and performed, then performance degrees are still critical. The people who play in pit orchestras, people who do session work on various instruments, people who play in ‘pickup orchestras’ who do film music, or accompany rock groups when they go ‘orchestra’, or who tour with Andre Rieiu are almost all performance majors. Try getting into the pit orchestra of a broadway production without the level that comes out of a performance degree at a good school, and see what happens, ‘naturally’ talented musicians won’t get in, pure and simple.</p>

<p>I do think there are too many performance programs, that kids in many cases are being sold a bill of goods, even some of the highly regarded programs are probably admitting students who realistically would have a near impossible time making it. The competition and the level of those auditioning is staggering, kids entering the top programs are playing better then many of the professional musicians out there from earlier generations…ultimately, though, the schools aren’t to blame, it is in unrealistic expectations. It is one of the problems with kids who were big fish in a small sea, they come out of there local area looking great, everyone tells them how good they are, and they are good enough to get into a decent music program, and then start facing reality. This isn’t even schools that are less competitive, many a kid gets through 4 years of am NEC, Rice, or Juilliard and has second thoughts when they start seeing the reality. It is great to dream and if a kid loves music enough to want to make a life at it, I think they deserve that chance, but they also should know the reality, what it means to be a musician and what it will likely be like going down the road, and if that gives them pause that isn’t a bad thing IMO. With music performance degrees, it needs to be treated as a tool set that comes with no guarantees of anything, it is why people who say becoming a doctor is such a tough path; musical students have to work as hard or harder then someone in a pre med program, and while we hear how grueling med school is and internship and residency, the difference is that music students toil away in undergrad,grad, then spend time trying to catch a break and make a llving, whereas a kid coming out of med school can generally find a well paying job, big difference.</p>

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<p>musicprnt for President!</p>

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<p>I think it’s a ill-mannered to bait people into a discussion and then pull out the rug by declaring it a joke. Also: this thread is double-posted on the MT forum. It’s also a violation of internet ethics, K8sDad, to call out someone’s real name on an anonymous forum in which we discuss our children’s futures. </p>

<p>Anyway, if you are feeling risk-averse, study accounting.</p>

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<p>I can see why people jumped to defend, explain and chastise; it’s a touchy topic, but I don’t understand how people “didn’t realize it was a joke” when the first post clearly stated:</p>

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<p>Having been chastised for my [apparently too sincere] response, you can bet that I won’t be offering my perspective to K8sdad anytime in the future. And I was hoping that his use of a longtime helpful poster’s name was a mistake, but if it was deliberate, then glassharmonica’s point about ethical communication is spot on.</p>

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<p>I’m with glassharmonica and stradmom on this one. The topic is a serious one for students considering going into music. As a parent I’ve seen too many other parents make one of two mistakes: assume their child can make it in music just because they are good at their school; or conversely they prevent a child who really is talented from developing because they themselves are too risk-averse.</p>

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<p>Okay, fisheee, I stand corrected. I guess I am remiss in not having read all the way to Rule #6. But my central point still stands: it is a serious breach of ethics to address someone by their real name in an anonymous forum.</p>

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<p>Glassharmonica: On the name issue, agreed 100%.</p>

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<p>Okay, in the original spirit of this thread (reputedly) I am going to take another spin on “risk” that is totally ‘serious’ in intent (not)…in order of ‘riskiness’ from worse to best:</p>

<p>OPERA: Way, way risky. If you are a guy, just thing about all the women in operas, they are just waiting to cheat on you with their pages (sometimes young men, sometimes girls (butch, dressed as boys)), and if you don’t sexually please them, well, you can end up with your head on a platter, or if you are a dad you daughter may harbor ill fantasies about you. If you are a woman, you can end up buried in a tomb for loving someone, your husband is bound to be cheating, if you happen to marry your sweetie it is likely an evil duke or prince is going to want to bed you first to cuckhold your sweetie and in some cases, you can be pursued by a lascivious lesbian noblewoman and end up carved up by Jack the Ripper. If you are a kid, you either are abused by an evil fisherman, or on your way to getting eaten by nasty witches.There are of course exceptions, in Rodelinda everyone acts like adults and no one ends up hurt, but to quote that eminent music critic Mr. B Bunny “What, you expected a happy ending? This is Opera, after all”</p>

<p>MT: Okay, bit better then Opera, but not always. We have cheating men and woman, we have women who make meat pies out of the victims of a mass murderer, we have for a male the prospect of being hounded by an out of control cop, or as a woman being chased by some sort of weirdo in a mask who thinks it is fun to drop a chandelier on someone, or we experience the world of discrimination and forbidden love and if you happen to find your love in a carnival barker, well, he is an abusive jerk. Kids, if they exist, are likely fodder for all kinds of things, including evil operators of orphanages and </p>

<p>Popular Music: The best of the lot, yeah, you have your cheating spouses, the woman who doesn’t care, runs away with your boss and takes your dog, you can have a love affair with a woman of ambiguous gender and your guy can be a louse,and the like, but looked overall, not bad. For every tale of a girl killing her sexually abusive father, you have love ballads and “I wanna Hold Your Hand”, at least there is some hope to get that eternal yearning fulfilled, to get the raging hormones satisfied and so forth. Definitely a better world for a gal, a guy or kids, for sure:)</p>

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<p>Country music: dog + truck = happiness, regardless of whether it works out with the girl or not. Only need to know three chords.</p>

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<p>We’ve been told over and over from reputable sources… and there are statics to back it up somewhere in this forum… that non-music grad schools (medicine, law, etc.) love music performance majors because they are well aware of the rigor and time commitment of a BM. So in the event that it comes down to a post undergrad career switch, perhaps that gives music degrees an edge over musical theater in the “practicality” department.</p>

<p>Although grad schools may look just as favorably on musical theater undergrads. I have no idea.</p>

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<p>"Although grad schools may look just as favorably on musical theater undergrads. I have no idea. "</p>

<p>Only if they do acceptances like in the movie “legally Blond”, where a video of Elle Woods (directed by ‘a Coppola’) in a bikini floating in a pool gets her into Harvard law School…(with similar twists for boys and/or for admissions committees with gay people of any gender <em>lol</em>)
(And folks, that is firmly tongue in cheek, no disrespect meant for MT majors or how hard that is…)</p>

<p>On a serious vein, yes, grad schools know how rigorous BM degree programs are, the same way undergraduate admissions know that high level music students in high school trying to get into the music school of the university have had to do a lot and thus may not have all the AP courses and such normally required). Not only grad schools, but many employers do as well, they realize that a BM degree is not an ‘easy’ degree, at least in my experience (may be because I am in a technical field, in a place like investment banking that would likely get you a snort of derisioni unless they did go to Harvard business school, wharton, etc grad…)</p>

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<p>Just kidding, but since we’re allowing tangents:</p>

<p>The answer to the riddle is MUSIC THEATRE.</p>

<p>And the reason is that they can ACT happy to serve you in the fine dining establishment of your choice while utilizing their fine coordination from intensive dance training and exude a peppy show-tune aura to inspire you to leave a REALLY BIG TIP.</p>

<p>By contrast, the commercial VP major will be surely from lack of sleep due to the late-night almost-free gig in Boise and the Opera singer will never get along with the chef because they’re both headstrong, passionate perfectionists ;)</p>

<p>There, is there any stereotype associated with the performing arts I’ve missed?
Hi ho ;)</p>

<p>PS The “real” answer might actually be that the LEAST risky path is the discipline at which the student performs THE BEST. Which comes down to which path they LOVE the most…because it’s the love that makes the music, isn’t it?</p>

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<p>Sting or Bono might have been a better way to go!</p>

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<p>Yes, kmcmom13, agreed. The bottom line: since all three are “risky,” it makes the most sense to make the choice based on PASSION, not practicality.</p>