My Daughter will be a Junior in HS next year and has taken Algebra, Geometry, and Algebra II. Does she need to take additional math courses? She is desirous of the extra practice time on violin, as auditions and key international competitions will be coming up soon. Thoughts by parents in a similar situation would be most helpful.
What she has already taken should be fine for most schools. S stopped after Algebra II, (no trig), and was accepted to both stand-alone conservatories and conservatories within Universities. Most college website admissions pages will state how many years/what level of math are recommended or required for admission. If she plans to apply to schools known for tough academic standards, you could check the websites or call admissions to be sure, but with very few exceptions, Algebra I, Algebra II and Geometry will be enough.
That is fine, it won’t hurt her, I haven’t seen any of the standalone conservatories that require any advanced math (if any at all), the only place where you might need it might be music schools inside a university where you apply to both the university and the music school (U michigan for example), But I am pretty sure that you don’t need advanced math even if they have requirements, so she should be fine. For schools within a university, they understand the challenges of getting admitted to a BM program, so she should be fine.
In terms of whether she will need it, that is another story, the only place where math seems to come into play is if you study modern music, especially serialism, that relies on mathematical concepts as the basis for the piece, things like matrices, fractals,stochatic analysis (sp?) and the like are major parts of how they are written and understanding them needed for analysis it seems from what my S has told me…
A conservatory within a University may request more. IU for example does require more (pre-calc, calc or trig). You do need to check school by school.
If you are straight conservatory bound (no university attachment), you are probably fine.
You can always visit a school’s website to check out admission requirements. If they do not list advanced math as a requirement, then you don’t have to worry about it.