<p>It's really frustrating how we students have to spend approximately 500 dollars per audition trip (you and mom or dad) that will only last about 20 minute with no guaranteed acceptance.
Some schools even have auditions knowing they can't accept any students or even less than 10 students.
I can't stop thinking about how waste of a money this is.
Anybody's comment?</p>
<p>I totally feel what you’re saying. </p>
<p>Maybe think of this though – At the very least, what you’ll get out of auditioning is invaluable experience that will boost your self-confidence, self-esteem, and auditioning skills.</p>
<p>Actually, if Mom or Dad goes with you on an audition trip which requires air travel and hotel, the trip will be far more expensive than $500! :)</p>
<p>Out of town on-site auditions can be enormously expensive, which is why I recommend that people choose their school carefully, and do some local or regional auditions as well, where possible. I also recommend doing a lot of the preliminary work in lessons and visits beforehand, which can be a way for both teachers to see you (upping your chances, hopefully, if you have selected schools well) and to eliminate schools which are not a good fit.</p>
<p>While there are some people who fly all over the country for auditions, it really isn’t feasible for most, both financially and in terms of time off from school/work. It’s a matter of choosing schools carefully, trying to schedule auditions of schools in proximity in ways to avoid multiple trips, and keeping the list on the shorter vs. longer side.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>D and I were talking about this on the way home from a pricey trip this weekend – going into music is definitely not for the faint of wallet. Please feel free to insert your own rant about elitism and culture here, if you like.</p>
<p>More discouraging to me at least is the years spent leading up to this expense. All-State auditions around here at least run somewhere in the neighborhod of $300 - $500. Most competitions run the same. You can get the same grade of 100 on an all-state piece here than the next musician yet they make all-state and you don’t. How about paying the $500 - $700 for a competiition in accompanist fees and recordings and if you win you get that whopping $100 check, granted you win but the investment is a bear. I am the proud purchaser of about $30K in professional instruments. I’ve spent $100 week in lessons for my 2 musicians for I can’t guess how many years. Gas, scheduling…
Well I can certainly go on and on…</p>
<p>Travelling baseball can’t be anywhere near this costly :-))</p>
<p>We live in a part of the country where there were good summer programs and now, college music programs, within driving distance. In most cases, 3 -5 hours away. I do research to get the best discount price for lodging. Our spending money for meals, etc, is limited. One good thing about this is that we have discovered great restaurants where actual students could afford to go to! So our travel expense for an audition is generally half of $500 or even less, with a couple of them not requiring an overnight stay. The number of schools with auditions that my h.s. senior applied to was limited by financial considerations, not just for the travel, but for probability of getting enough financial aid. Fortunately, we found what we think are enough great programs that met all these criteria. Hoping for the best.</p>
<p>Good luck to all who are auditioning/interviewing in coming weeks.</p>
<p>On a POSITIVE note, the merit money my son got for only ONE year at college erased not only the cost of our audition trip, but also the cost of his pre-screen recordings, lessons for many years, and some flights home!</p>
<p>SJTH - what a great perspective.</p>
<p>My S researched schools and teachers very carefully, and applied to only 4 schools. That meant only 3 trips, as two of the schools had auditions back to back. As I flew in from Germany to accompany him to that one, our cost was significantly greater than $500!</p>
<p>Yes, merit has covered it multiple times over. If he’d been willing to go to school in state, we’d have made out like bandits.</p>
<p>From another angle, one of my children had 10 years of piano lessons, and 4 years of guitar, and chose not to study music in college. We still had to make trips to visit the schools. He ultimately attended a school that doesn’t give scholarships. So his was actually the more expensive route.</p>
<p>To the OP - Would it be a better expenditure or somehow less of a waste of money to spend a year, at the cost of $24,000 - $54,000 a year to discover that you either don’t like the school, aren’t competitively strong enough as a student to sufficiently benefit from their instruction, or that music is not your avocation? Have you seen that Ladders commercial where a tennis court is flooded with players so the pros can’t play?</p>
<p>The audition is not for the sole benefit of THE SCHOOL. The audition is also to benefit YOU and help find the right fit. Fit can’t be determined remotely from a website (often, although research helps in advance.)</p>
<p>Saying an audition is a waste of money is tantamount to saying you’re not worth the investment. If you’re worth 4 years of study, you’re worth a few thousand well-thought-out and well-spent dollars finding the right place for you to be mentored!</p>
<p>How’s that for a completely different way of looking at it! I bet you spent $500 at the movies and entertainment last year – whereas this is for a lifetime of enjoyment and profession!</p>
<p>How about this one – the cost of the audition trip pales in comparison to the costs of getting the student applicant to this point. When I think of what we’ve spent on lessons, instruments, tolls (private lessons are in NYC; we live in suburbs), gas, performance clothes, summer programs, not to mention the non-income producing time contributed by parents, etc…whew!!! (And that’s only the $$$ costs, not the time and effort spent by our children practicing.) So, a few more dollars on the top of an already huge heap of dough shouldn’t, I think, be a major cause of consternation!</p>
<p>Good luck on every single audtion and congratulations on getting this far!</p>
<p>One more perspective. Now an empty nester with 2 of 3 kids 2000 miles away. I have great memories of the one long distance audition trip I took with son that I will treasure always. Not sure his view as a 19 year old today, but some day I think he will think of it fondly too. I would spend much more than what we spent for my memories. These are key times in the life of the students that you won’t get experience again. I encourage all parties to enjoy them as much as possible. </p>
<p>P.S. empty nesting isn’t all bad</p>
<p>Interesting comments! After reading them, I thought back across the past 12 years or so and added up the cost of lessons, summer programs, instruments, sheet music, recordings, etc. When I reached 35,000, I stopped counting. That is probably low compared to a family whose child has attended very expensive summer programs, etc. While I can see that a large music scholarship would possibly cover those expenses, I did not consider them to be in preparation for a college music major until a couple of years ago. Regardless of that, I consider money I have spent on music training to be worth every penny and I would not have regretted any of it even if my senior had decided to major in math or biology.</p>
<p>I also have waxed on about those audition trips. Gee, they were fun, and there is nothing like a five hour car ride or plane trip with your kid, to really get talking with no distractions! I still look back on those trips fondly.</p>
<p>Like Rigaudon, I have never regretted the money spent on my son’s musical education (and I stopped counting the expenses at $12K, spent only his senior year…). It has been my greatest pleasure to support his development in this way (even if he HAD gone into Math, which was our original plan!).</p>
<p>But…music certainly is a pricey undertaking.</p>
<p>Thank you very much for the perspective given in this thread. We’re about to start a string of very expensive audition trips. Those traveling from smaller airports know that flight prices can be double or triple those from the bigger airports. Add in mom’s travel, hotels, meals and it starts to total into the thousands…Ah, but what precious memories, I’m really looking forward to it. What a wonderful time. Good luck to all.</p>
<p>Like rigaudon I don’t regret the money either (even though teenagers can certainly push you to that point :-)) My son attends a state U (SUNY Potsdam) and I can’t complain about the tuition, my daughter will probably attend a State U as while so scholarship $$ is obviously not the payback (although nice). </p>
<p>To me the payback has always been listening to them play, start new pieces and work out the kinks, practice at the most unlikely times, grow with and into their instruments and most of all perform for groups (you can’t top the pride).</p>
<p>These audition trips are important in another way. It taught D how to travel efficiently and safely. Once she became a junior and was traveling alone to NYC and other locales for summer program auditions and later for grad school auditions, she was more than able to negotiate the ins and outs of the quick cheap trip. If you are going to be in music…you need to learn how to travel.</p>
<p>I know only too well, and we aren’t even near the finish line with all the expenses, somewhere near the middle of the journey, or maybe further…</p>
<p>Classical music especially is not for the faint of heart (I am not talking other forms, since I know very little about how much that costs or doesn’t cost, not because it isn’t difficult or expensive). </p>
<p>The cost in time and money is staggering, adding in private lessons that probably for the time he has been playing average out to be roughly 75/week, for let’s say the first 9 years he was playing before getting into pre college, and you have somewhere in the neighborhood of 40k just there…strings, that wear out in a month, rehairs (roughly every 6-8 weeks), instruments, music (scores), pre college tuition, gas, mileage, tolls, and it adds up…then when you get to competitions (flying to one in March, that between airfare and hotel is going to be a young fortune), it is staggering. And we are fortunate, we live in a suburb of NYC with easy access to all that is there, there are people at Juilliard pre college who fly their kids in from the coast each week, drive overnight, you name it, just to get there…There are wonderful programs that don’t require huge financial committment, like the New York Youth Symphony, but that is fairly rare, and even local youth orchestras can be expensive (local one in my neck of the woods is more then 1000 a year now, for a program that is so-so quality). Then there are the summer festivals and such, that seem more like summer camp, but are somehow part of the process. </p>
<p>Frankly, yes classical music is elitist, to get to the high levels either requires pretty deep pockets on the part of the parents, or finding foundations or groups to help pay for it…and based on my experience, you also have to know the realities, about how to navigate things, because who the teacher is and what the kid has access to makes a world of difference. Talking to outside people, most believe that a kid can do ‘well’ on an instrument through high school, and then get ‘serious’ in college (which was true up until not all that long ago, 30 years ago that might be true to some extent), but it doesn’t happen like that these days, the ‘seriousness’ has to happen much earlier, given the competition out there and so forth…</p>
<p>And to be bluntly honest, the whole thing is an exercise in what the original poster said, about having to go through the time, expense and work without knowing if even there is any possibility of a reward at the end, whether it is an audition, a competition, whatever, it is a crap shoot where the dice are not only loaded, there is no way to know at least a general indication whether they are loaded for or against a particular candidate. </p>
<p>Is it worth it? If a child is really into music, if they really think they want/need/desire to do it, then that is the price of admission. Yes, it is frustrating, it is hard to go through life with a musical child (not to mention, god bless them, the people with multiple kids into serious music), it is hard having to figure out how to pay for all this, to wonder where the time on the weekend went when you have a ton of things to do and you realize it is sitting around all day waiting for the child to finish a program, or in orchestra rehearsals or chamber rehearsals and the like…or wonder why vacation is spent catching up on things around the house, or why you are driving a car older then reruns of tv shows on “Nick at Night” and the like…</p>
<p>But of course there are the triumphs, of seeing the passion the child has, of seeing them grow, the confidence that comes with time, the joy of doing music, and seeing that there is some pay off for all this hard work, like when a child wins a competition or gets to play with a high level group or the like.</p>
<p>I wish it was easier, and I want to add I am not pooh poohing those who feel down about the cost, about the effort, and looking at a future, for all that effort, that isn’t often all that promising, we are brought up to believe that if you put the effort in, if you sacrifice, if you really, really make the effort, that the rewards flow, but in music it is the worlds weirdest crapshoot. Anthony Thomasini, senior music critic of the NY Times, hit the nail on the head, when he wrote about hearing someone complain about how tough it was to get into medical school, about how expensive it was to train as a doctor and so forth, and he said being a doctor was a lot less daunting then going into music; musicians can spend a lot more money on getting to the high level then someone going to college and medical school, work themselves silly to survive, but unlike doctors they don’t have the guarantee of a job and they sure as heck have a minimal chance compared to doctors of the financial rewards that can come with being an MD…come out with a music degree, and the only guarantee you have is it is going to be tough, come out with an MD and it is almost guaranteed there is a position for you somewhere, that even though it may not be glamorous, probably has decent pay and benefits with it with promise of much more. </p>
<p>And while it doesn’t seem like it at the time, all the disappointments, the things that don’t work out, are learning experiences in themselves, hopefully a prospective musician learns from the ones that don’t work, gains experience so eventually it does pay off, or at least we hope. I am not justifying the inanities, like someone auditioning without an opening, or auditioning to go through the motions when they have a ‘back door’ candidate (and yes, that does go on, and it isn’t just speculation…).</p>
<p>All I can offer is that a lot of people understand the pain, expense and frustration of all this, and maybe, just maybe, knowing you aren’t alone gives some comfort in itself.</p>
<p>It is very trying, I know. We made a point to enjoy the time in these cities, at the schools. I believe we have memories of lots of laughs, anxiety and some disappointments. I have two in college for music. Oldest is a senior at a conservatory for music theater, youngest is at a major university for instrumental performance. Auditioning was so much easier for oldest because of region auditions. She auditioned to 4 or 5 schools in just one weekend! Regional auditions were not an option for younger d. Not only were regions not an option, in most cases there was only one day offered for her instrument! So, we decided to have mini vacations and only traveled to her very top choices. You really cannot let these issues get to you. Also remember you may be auditioning for them, but they are also auditioning for you! D walked out of a couple auditions knowing she would not attend that school. </p>
<p>Final thought: I still LOVE hearing kids tell my d that she is JUST a music major!!! These are the same kids that applied online, wrote an essay and four weeks later got a letter along with thousands of other saying they were in! The apps were the easiest part of the application process for music majors! So, hold your head up high and know you have made amazing accomplishments just being where you are now.</p>
<p>musicprnt-
Your words are so true. We are (were) one of those families that traveled a 3 hour round trip every Saturday morning for orchestra rehearsals, paying tuitions, summer programs…ect. It is a passion-a very pricey passion. No one has mentioned the mere cost of the instrument could buy a very nice car! However; not many kids would take an instrument over a car, or would spend their weekends in rehearsal or performing. But musicians do. I am very proud of all of them.
But here is my thoughts…for every amazing flute or violin or viola or vocalist or WHATEVER that is seen, heard and competing; that are driven three hours to rehearsals; that are flown in for pre college programs… I truly believe there are hundreds that are not “seen”, that are doing it on their own without the support or knowledge we have. But they still have the passion and natural music gift. Can you be accepted to schools without an amazing resume? Just wondering…</p>
<p>I’m afraid my earlier post was perceived as complaining about the costs of raising a musically talented child or perhaps that it led to a discussion that I did not intend. Yes, we’ve made many of the financial tradeoffs (sacrifices?) that others have mentioned but I wouldn’t have had it any other way. The memories and pleasures are more delicious than almost anything I can imagine – regardless of where my son ends up professionally. Those of us with children who are musicians (all of us older members of this group, perhaps) understand that there really wasn’t much of a choice in the end. I, for one, feel so lucky to share, albeit from the sidelines, a passion that truly comes from within.</p>