<p>Reposted in new forum</p>
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<p>Help me decide... I'm accepted at all four... leaning towards olaf for the choirs/big music dept. BUt others gave better finaid offers. I hate to turn down better schools and better offers, but.... I want to major in music theory or music ed. I like Rice, but didnt apply to shepard school, so limited to just taking music classes, not a major, if i go there. Can you give me advice?</p>
<p>Are you primarily a singer? Williams has a fantastic choral director (Brad Wells) and the chamber choir has a lot of great singers. The larger concert choir includes a lot of people who sing more recreationally, myself included, and we’re probably not as serious as anyone at St. Olaf, but we still perform great music - in the past three years we’ve sung the Brahms Requiem, Martin Mass, and Bach B Minor Mass, in addition to a bunch of smaller works - and generally do it quite well, IMHO. If you have questions about choral opportunities at Williams; you should definitely email Brad (<a href=“mailto:Bradley.C.Wells@williams.edu”>Bradley.C.Wells@williams.edu</a>); he’s a super-nice guy and I’m sure he’d be happy to talk to you.</p>
<p>I don’t think we have any kind of official music ed. concentration available as part of the music major, but there are plenty of opportunities to learn theory. Also, if you want to get hands-on experience with education, I’m sure it’s possible to spend some time as a student teacher helping out in the local schools; Williams is really good at arranging things like that.</p>
<p>St. Olaf and Williams are also very different schools for lots of other reasons (e.g. religious midwestern school with a dry campus vs. liberal New England mountain village). Williams is probably academically stronger in general, though I don’t know if this extends to music since that’s a particular strength of St. Olaf. I would tend to lead towards picking the place you’d rather spend four years at, rather than just going for the better musical program (since after all, if your only concern was strength of music program over all else, you probably would have applied to conservatories). If you think Williamstown is horribly isolated and boring, then you probably shouldn’t come here. If you’re not so interested in the religious overtones of St. Olaf, then maybe you shouldn’t go there. And so on. My guess is that those sorts of considerations are probably going to be more important to you, in the long run, though of course it’s your choice. </p>
<p>One last thing is that a smaller music program does have the silver lining of generally presenting more opportunities to take on leadership roles. If you’re interested, it’s not too difficult to work your way to being a student conductor of one of the Williams choirs (you basically just have to take the choral conducting class and convince Brad you’re halfway competent), which is great experience (especially if you want to go on into teaching or directing) that you might not get as easily elsewhere.</p>
<p>thank you so much for great info! Does your choir go on tour? How many members are in the choir? Do you sing in an a cappella group?</p>
<p>No problem. The concert choir has about 60 members, and the chamber choir (a subset of concert choir) has closer to 15. The choirs go on tour every two years during Winter Study (the first couple weeks are spent rehearsing, then the next couple are the tour itself); last year we went to Argentina, hung out on the beach, and got to sing in a bunch of old cathedrals, which was really cool. Two years before that was Rome. I think next year’s tour might be to South Africa, but it’s not finalized yet.</p>
<p>I don’t personally sing in an acapella group, but I know a bunch of people who do. All the groups have websites, so you can check them out online: google “springstreeters”, “williams octet”, “ephoria”, “williams accidentals”, “williams good question”, “ephlats”, and “williams elizabethans”.</p>
<p>thank you very much. great info. so have you taken any music classes? I’m wondering how Williams would compare to Olaf in the musci department. Are the classes hard core? are there enough classes? can you go “in depth” in music studies?</p>
<p>I’ve only taken the intro music theory sequence (103 and 104), which were not easy, but not soul-crushingly hard either. Those class in particular I think people tend to have wildly different experiences with depending on their musical background - some find them incredibly easy, while others struggle a lot. I don’t know much about the upper level classes. I’ve never hear my music major friends complain about lack of classes, but it’s not something that would necessarily come up in casual conversation, so I can’t really say. You can check out the course offerings in the catalog (<a href=“Williams College”>http://www.williams.edu/admin/registrar/catalog/coi1011.pdf</a>, music begins on page 157). At first glance it looks like a lot of the more specialized electives are only offered once every two or three years, so although there are lots of options you’d need to be a bit strategic in planning out what you’re going to want to take.</p>
<p>Dear Jeke,
Thanks for all your posts and your help. I finally decided… and I’m going to Olaf! It was a tough choice. I chose it for the broad choral/music program. Thanks for your time to answer my questions!!!</p>