<p>Hello! I am looking for a good music school. I plan on being a music major, concentration in vocal performance/French minor. I prefer under 10,000 students at my college. Both state and private schools are good.I am in the top 1/3 of 530 at a very competetive school (Weighted GPA- 3.1). I will be taking the SATs Saturday, so I have no scores to post yet. If anybody can make good reccomendations, I'd appreciate it very much! Thanks for your time!</p>
<p>You may have found that most vocal performance programs are at huge universities. You're looking at smaller schools - good voice programs with the flexibility to minor in a liberal arts area? College rather than conservatory-type environments? Good academically without being excessive longshots for admission? Smaller campuses like this might include Illinois Wesleyan, College of Wooster and Furman. Ithaca College is a bit larger, though as a former conservatory its curriculum might not allow much room for minors. A little larger are Miami and SMU.</p>
<p>St. Olaf, Lawrence, Oberlin</p>
<p>Rice- you would have to audition in. PM me if you want more info. D is a vocal performance major at Rice. The voice faculty is awesome.</p>
<p>Check out the articles at <a href="http://www.peabody.jhu.edu/index.php?pageID=787%5B/url%5D">http://www.peabody.jhu.edu/index.php?pageID=787</a> even if you are not really interested in Peabody. (If you are interested in Musical Theater, as your screen name would imply, then you certainly don't want to go there, because they have no MT program.) They have a few well-written essays that should be of interest to any potential music majors and their parents.</p>
<p>CCM - (University of Cincinnati) - it is a bit big though...</p>
<p>are u looking at conservatories?</p>
<p>No, I am not looking at conservatories. I am not looking at musical theatre either.(too limiting.) Thanks for your ideas and please keep them coming. Any good state schools?</p>
<p>UCLA's vocal department has been expanding like mad recently, and the vocal students in particular have been having lots of success within months after graduating (Winning big competitions etc). They also let undergraduates have leading roles in thier performances, which is a significant factor to consider. Lots of places don't even let you perform until junior year. I know it's bigger than you want, but it's a state university so...</p>
<p>Northwestern has about 8,000 students, and it's music department is great. I have several friends who go there and they love it. They're instrumentalists though, and I don't know very much about the voice teachers.</p>
<p>University of Missouri Kansas City has a really strong music department, vocal especially. Plenty of performance opportunities. I saw several of their voice students in a competition once, and they were really really good.</p>
<p>Rice University has a great music department. One of my friends who graduated last year is a voice major there now, and she loves it.</p>
<p>Harvard and Tufts both have special arrangements with New England Conservatory. You have to get into both the college and the conservatory to take advantage of everything though.</p>
<p>Johns Hopkins + Peabody = Awesome. If you get into the university, you can take lessons at the conservatory for credit regardless of whether you're double-enrolled.</p>
<p>Indiana has one of the top vocal programs. D thought it would be better for grad school, but she thought it was better than Julliard. Indiana is a large program and the performance opps for undergrads (espec freshmen) are somewhat limited.</p>
<p>In which region of the country do you want to attend college? Are you looking for a music dept or school of music? If you want to stay in the central part of the country, consider Michigan, Northwestern, Indiana, Vanderbilt, Rice.<br>
Personal observations-- D auditioned at Northwestern and Vandy. Visited Rice but elected not to do as too far from home (another consideration for you!--most kids won't acknowledge they'll miss home but many get incredibly homesick, so keep that in mind as the freshman year can be very stressful) plus by then D was sick of the entire auditioning thing. We didn't do Michigan and Indiana since we thought they were too big and you could get lost.
Rice and Vandy have very new up to date facilities--important to us. Northwestern's school reeked of mold and is extremely old--there were also other factors which you'll see if you audition but the allergies can make you miserable if you can't handle mold. All of these schools are very small. IIRC, the class at vandy is around 50, Rice 25 and Northwestern is around 100. Michigan and Indiana are larger, not to mention that the entire school is much bigger than what you'd find at Vandy, Rice, and NW.<br>
Lawrence seemed too small for us and the town of Appleton in the winter seemed god awful. D hated the audition professor's attitude so it didn't bode well. If you are looking for a Jesuit school giving tremendous financial aid, take a look at the School of Music at Loyola New Orleans. Very up to date facilities, great town for things to do. D just didn't want to go that far from home.
One thing to keep in mind, your SAT/ACT scores won't kill you except at a few schools. It's the audition that is the most important item. Do yourself a favor and make a tape or cd just in case you get sick and can't sing without sounding like a foghorn.
One other note on Peabody--great school but too far away for D. Also, the homeless scared her off of downtown Baltimore. But the old school is incredibly maintained and updated--no smell of mold.
Good luck and enjoy the auditions. Have fun.</p>
<p>Musictoad, do we have the same kid? D hated Lawrence (the town, etc.) but DID love the voice teacher. She also thought the facilities at Northwestern were terrible, old and smelly. She loved Evanston and the university, just not the music school. The interesting thing about Rice was that she was returning to her home state after boarding at Interlochen her last 2 years of high school! She said she would never come back to Texas, but Rice was the perfect fit and she loves it. She told me last night she would have been fine at Oberlin (even though it lost a lot of points with her for being in the middle of a corn field) or Indiana (even though it is so big). Her order of preference after all her auditions was: Rice, Indiana, Cleveland Institute/Case, Oberlin, Boston U, New England Conservatory. She blew her Julliard audition so that was off the list, which I viewed as a good thing.</p>
<p>Momofwildchild---we probably don't have the same kid but I think vocalists think in a somewhat similar thought pattern.
I really really liked Rice but D had fought illness all throughout the auditions and was sick of being "paraded". She refused to cut a tape and to do one more audition if needed and she didn't want to be 1000 miles from home--very perceptive on her part as this year triggered incredible homesickness. She now admits she was a brat throughout the process. But she did get in her #1 favorite school so all ended well. Perhaps grad school but I've been informed that she's thinking of Yale's Music School. I grow poorer by the minute.</p>
<p>Musictoad - Yale could be a fine choice, but be aware that they do not have a performance major for undergrads. She would be doing a BA in music. Her stats will make Yale a big reach as she will not get much of a boost for music.</p>
<p>Moms of singers - my daughter's looking at NWern, Rice, Vandy; we haven't actively considered Oberlin because of the odd split-personality of the campus culture. What were your feelings about the sense of community there? Do the conservatory kids hang out and interact with the liberal arts kids? Is there any educational benefit of being at an elite LAC, or is it just a conservatory that shares close quarters with the rest of the college?</p>
<p>I suspect the music v. non-music culture at Oberlin isn't that different from Rice. At Rice the music majors are called "musis". D interacts with a wide range of kids. Her boyfriend shares her interest in music and is in two choirs with her and in some student-run productions, but he is a pre-med major. She takes some courses outside the music school, eats lunch with a range of students etc. Voice is a little different, because you don't practice it for as many hours as you do some instruments. This allows you to be a little more social.</p>
<p>gadad, although not the mom of a singer, I have visited Oberlin a couple of times with my daughter. My impressions were that the conservatory is rather well integrated with the rest of the college. First off, about a quarter of the conservatory students are doing a double degree five-year program in which they take classes in both schools and eventually get a degree from both. The rest of the conservatory students take one or two electives per semester from the college. These are not special classes for conservatory students only, they are the same ones the LAC students take. The conservatory students are allowed into pretty much any class for which they have met the prerequisites. Because of this, academic credentials can be a bit more important for admissions than they would be at a stand-alone conservatory, although probably not as important as at Rice.</p>
<p>Students from the LAC can take some of the conservatory classes, including getting private lesons on voice or an instrument from the conservatory profs (if they have space available) or from selected third and fourth year students otherwise.</p>
<p>The students from the conservatory and LAC are not segregated in terms of housing or dining. There are probably some students who rarely bother to come out of the conservatory complex, but you can find some like that on any campus. There are probably some college students who do not attend a single event at the conservatory in their time at Oberlin, but I bet they are a very small minority.</p>
<p>There is no sorority/fraternity scene and the college is in a small town. Despite this, there seemed to be no shortage of things to do socially. If your daughter is specifically looking forward to city life, then Oberlin is not the place. Otherwise, I think it you should check it out.</p>
<p>Just a quick thought for those of you with musical kids - it's all well and good for them to go far away for school, but keep in mind that they're going to want you to come for their recitals and concerts. I thank my lucky stars on a regular basis that my kids chose to stay close to home. My son is at Peabody, and we run back and forth to campus for concerts and debuts (he's a composer) on such a regular basis that I can probably recite the Amtrak schedule between Philly and B'more by now. DD is at Univ. of Delaware, even closer, so when she's involved in a show with her theater group or she's in a choral concert, it's a snap to attend. We've enjoyed these opportunities tremendously, and were envied greatly by a friend whose DD is a voice major at Rice and who had to choose which one or two concerts/recitals she'd be able to afford to attend each year. As luck would have it, her husband was recently transferred to Austin, so now she can see her daughter perform, but now she isn't around to see her son, who goes to school in PA! Anyway, keep travel feasibility in the back of your mind when you and your kid(s) think about location - it shouldn't be the determining factor in which school is chosen, but it may be a factor you want to take into account if you and your child are particularly close.</p>
<p>marcyr, can you PM me and tell me who the voice major at Rice is? D is a Rice voice major and she must know your friend! Thanks.</p>
<p>Marcyr- you are right about being close for performances. It is yummy icing on the cake. Son is deleriously happy as a music performance major at Redlands. Really the only time we see him is when we go to performances or they lock the dorms for break.</p>