<p>I am an orchestral trumpet player, and I have decided that a liberal arts degree is more important to me than a conservatory degree. I absolutely loved Yale and St. Olaf, I know that Lawrence is a good option. Where else is there?
I ruled out Emory, DePauw and Furman because I really don't want to go to a school with a lot of fraternities.
I have heard that getting by in Oberlin's music department as a non-major can be difficult. Same applies to Carnegie Mellon. I don't want to be bound to a five year dual degree program at schools such as Oberlin, Rochester/Eastman, and Harvard/NEC. The orchestras at Vassar, Pomona, MacAlester, and Colby don't seem up to snuff. Nobody at Occidental bothered to answer my emails. Are the orchestras for non-majors at Johns Hopkins and Rice at the conservatory level, or close? I will be more than happy at Yale, St Olaf, or Lawrence, but I've been having enormous difficulty finding other places with such flexible and prestigious music departments. Answers to any and all of these questions are greatly appreciated. Thanks!</p>
<p>Did you post this in the music majors forum? Might get more experts over there…</p>
<p>There is a wealth of information in the Music Major forum for musicians who both want to major in performance and those who just want to perform in college but study something else. Here is one representative thread: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/music-major/444579-strong-orchestras-liberal-arts-schools.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/music-major/444579-strong-orchestras-liberal-arts-schools.html</a></p>
<p>I recommend that you browse around in the forum, and do some forum specific searches using key words. Some posters may know about the adjunct trumpet professors at different liberal arts colleges that you may be considering, and many people can chime in about the caliber of the orchestras for non music majors.</p>
<p>Houghton College (NY) is a Liberal Arts College that has the Greatbatch School of Music. The school would offer what you’re trying to do and it is a little known secret that they have shared a lot of faculty with Eastman.</p>
<p>I’ll try to answer your question about JHU. The non-conservatory orchestra, the Hopkins Symphony, is quite good. It is university-wide (i.e., far more than just undergraduates–graduate students, faculty, administrators, staff, doctors, etc.) and many of the musicians are quite accomplished–but good amateurs as opposed to budding professionals, which is what you would find at the Peabody Symphony (the conservatory orchestra). I suspect that the difference is, for Peabody students, music is their life while, for musicians at the HSO, it is their avocation. You can check out the HSO at [Hopkins</a> Symphony Orchestra](<a href=“http://www.jhu.edu/jhso/index.html]Hopkins”>http://www.jhu.edu/jhso/index.html)</p>
<p>One advantage of going to Hopkins as an undergraduate is that, if you can pass an audition, you can take performance classes at Peabody Conservatory and any student can take non-performance music classes there or non-conservatory performance classes at Peabody Preparatory.</p>