<p>As we research schools and teachers for D, a HS junior who is considering a double major, we have come across some very high level musicians and teachers in her field who appear to have majored in non-music fields as undergrads, then did music in grad school. I am wondering if there are any people/families out there that have any experience with this, and how did it work out? How hard is it to go from non-music as an undergrad to music in grad school, provided one continues their training at a high level? And what about all those classroom hours in music, such as theory and history. Dont they need those to get into grad school? Thanks in advance for your stories and advice.</p>
<p>We knew one outstanding cellist who did a double degree at Yale in Geology and Geophysics, and continued her training under Parisot. She took lots of theory and music history at Yale as well, and was active in as many high level performance ensembles as possible. She started working in her degree field, and hated it. </p>
<p>She went back and did her MM at Yale SOM (I thinks she was just under 30), and then a GPD at UC Boulder under the Takacs String Quartet. </p>
<p>Son had a peer at Columbia, also a cellist, conservatory ability. Graduated with an architectural degree and lost his job 3 months later to the economy. I ran into his father after the holidays, and he said the son was contemplating going back for an MM in performance. Figured he might just as well be an unemployed musician in addition to an unemployed architect.</p>
<p>Both of these are high level musicians with years of training, competition, summer immersion/festival programs under their belts who continued to study music as undergrads, but were not music majors. In both cases, theory and history, piano skills were not an issue, as they had the background before and during undergrad.</p>
<p>It is possible, I have known of some musicians who did just that, studied an academic discipline UG, but kept up with their lessons and performance,studied music theory and ear training privately,and then got a masters in music performance. The key factor I suspect there is seeing what the graduate programs expect; when you do an UG music degree on top of lessons on the instrument and ensemble performance, the kids also get a strong grounding in music theory and ear training, and I suspect grad programs would expect performance majors to have a strong basis in those as one of their pre-reqs (not totally sure, and every program is different). </p>
<p>That said, I suspect that it takes someone pretty disciplined to follow that path, that they will need to spend a lot of time in their UG days working on their musical side, to be able to do what you are asking.</p>
<p>D was told that it’s easier to go from a music major to a nonmusic grad program than vice versa, but I’m sure there are stories of people who made it work either way.</p>
<p>oops posted in wrong thread-- moderators please remove this</p>
<p>What about our friend Cosmos? Is she majoring in music at U of Chicago? I don’t know…but she has participated in some great summer programs…and I would think that, if she wanted to, she could major in music as a grad student.</p>
<p>Thanks for the shout-out, hahaha… </p>
<p>I was just thinking that this is definitely a possibility – A friend of mine was at Williams College, then went to Juilliard, and is now in the Montreal Symphony. Another great player was at Johns Hopkins for physics, then went to Rice, and is now (also) in the Montreal Symphony.</p>
<p>Thanks for all your stories. I had suspected that this pathway is not generally for “mere mortals”.</p>
<p>Sure, it’s not common, but it happens. Besides the two bassists I mentioned in my last post, there’s also a violist in the Met I know who did an econ degree at Cornell… and a bassoonist in the Chicago Symphony who studied physics (I believe)… and of course the great Edgar Meyer who studied mathematics! He even went to math camp at UChicago when he was a teenager!</p>