<p>Would majoring in music in a liberal arts school or conservatory style school be more helpful for undergrad (especially as a music education major)? Will trying to focus on liberal arts and music make me weaker at both? Would it be hard to get into a good music program for graduate school if I go to a less intense music school for undergrad?</p>
<p>The way that I understand it, a lot of music grad schools have auditions, just like undergrad colleges, so if you have the performance skills, having a less concentrated music education, like a BA in music will not hurt you.</p>
<p>Of course having a more concentrated music education as an undergrad can help improve those performance skills, so that’s something to consider.</p>
<p>Most grad schools do not discriminate against students with BA’s, as the BA is actually intended to largely be preparation for grad schools (BA’s rarely have a direct tract to a career in their major without grad school). However, if you have a BA outside of the field of study for your grad degree, or if you don’t have all the prereqs for that grad degree, you may find yourself in grad school a little longer to make up those prerequisits.</p>
<p>Like at my son’s college, they have two different MBA tracts. One is a one year plus a summer program for students who have undergrad degrees in business, the other is a two year program for students that don’t have undergrad business degrees. It’s the same way with most grad school majors. You could get a BA in music and with really good grades you could get accepted into med school, but it would probably take you longer to graduate from med school because you would likely have to start out taking the prerequisit classes for med school (lots of biology, chemistry, math, possibly physics).</p>
<p>If you intend to teach music, I would suspect that most BM Music Ed programs would have all the coursework that you need, regardless of what type of college you go to, to go to grad school for a Masters in music education (MM in music ed, MAT with emphasis in music ed, or similar degree). Some Masters degrees programs for teaching music focus more on teaching music than they focus on performance, others are really more performance based, it just depends on the college. At some colleges, there are no performance requirements at all for students who already have years of music teaching experience, and thus a MM in music ed is one of the few MM degrees that you can get totally or almost totally online from legit colleges.</p>