<p>Smilemask-</p>
<p>I totally agree with the others, you should try and find a piano instructor/teacher, preferably someone who teaches in a high level program or has high level students, to get an assesment. Without that, there is really no way to know what your level is, take it from me. I can sort of speak from my own experiences with my son, who is a passionate violinist. Several years ago, he had been working with local teachers, was in a local youth symphony,and to my wife and I sounded really, really good, and to others, even people who had musical training, including someone with a PHd from Yale in music (not in S’s instrument, I will add), all thought he was great, ready for carnegie hall, etc…and that illusion came up short when he in effect moved to the next level, with a teacher who teaches at Juilliard, and we started realizing the difference as someone else said, of ‘playing’ a piece and ‘PLAYING’ a piece. It is a lot more then being able to play the piece and have it be recognizable, there are all kinds of elements, many of them quite subtle,that unless you or the person listening are trained to hear, you won’t but people auditioning will.With my son, it was almost like starting over, learning to crawl again…</p>
<p>In my son’s case, he had been studying with local teachers, and the last one before he moved ‘up’ is a principal in a relatively high level orchestra, and even she didn’t seem to pick up what my son was lacking (or maybe she did and didn’t care, I don’t know). If my son had continued with teachers like that, and tried to get into a competitive conservatory, he probably would have failed.</p>
<p>The piano is not unlike the violin world from everything I know. Because it is a soloists instrument, it tends to attract a lot of people trying to play it, and given the global competition from places like China where piano is incredibly popular (as is violin), it has raised the bar a great deal.To give you an idea, this past year for entrance into Juilliard’s pre college piano program, they had something like 130 kids apply (roughly 35% of that was from overseas, mostly China or Korea), auditioned 40 and accepted maybe 10, and conservatories are no easier.</p>
<p>I think you also need to figure out, if you really think you may want to play the piano, on what it is you want to do. Classical piano performance is only one track, there also could be studying piano leaning towards jazz or ‘contemporary’ music. The real key is to figure out what you want to do and if going into piano performance is really ‘it’. As the threads violadad posted are going to show, getting into performance is very difficult (though nothing in music seems to be ‘easy’), and to go into that takes a lot of dedication and perserverence which generally takes being totally committed, which means ‘being sure’</p>
<p>Likewise, you mention composition, have you done any work with music theory or tried to compose? Do you know anything about it? Though it is probably different then performance in that it seems,from what I have read on here, that going in on composition it is more about potential then past experience, since most people entering college probably have little experience with composing. If you are seriously thinking about it, you may want to try reading some books on music theory and/or composition to try and get an idea of what it is about and what you face if you really want to go down that path. </p>
<p>Peabody is a competitive program, up there with many of the other top tier conservatories,and I suspect you will find that even the ‘next’ tier down might be incredibly competitive. And as a lot of other threads on here have said, with people accomplished on the piano auditons are a crapshoot, depends on open slots,who they are auditioning against and so forth. </p>
<p>In any event, the first step would be to decide if you really want to try and enter this world, get an evaluation to see where you are, and then make decisions on if this is something you really want to do. I wish you luck.</p>