<p>First of all, my college list is mostly composed of liberal arts schools like Kenyon and Trinity College, since I performed my search without regard to major, and applied undecided. I applied to a few universities as well, like Pitt and UNC-CH. Anyway, the more I think about it, the more I feel like I want to major in music, along with something else. I understand the difficulty in double-majoring with music. I also read about holding the teacher in higher regard than the pretige of the program. My point is that I'm wondering if it would be worth it to double-major in general music and let's say biology at one of these liberal arts schools? If I go into music, I want to do it right. My instrument is also one that I think most wouldn't consider an instrument to play exclusively.</p>
<p>What instrument and kind of music are you interested in? Kenyon happens to have a good guitar department and Pitt has a great Jazz program. Pitt also mentions on their web site that a lot of their music students are double majors.</p>
<p>Music and a lab science can be particularly hard to coordinate at many schools because both lab courses and ensemble rehearsals tend to get scheduled in overlapping time slots. See if you can find a schedule of classes with meeting times on each school's web site and figure out whether you could have this problem.</p>
<p>You should also talk to the music teacher(s) for you instrument and someone in the biology department (or whatever second major interests you) to see if there is support for double majors. If both sides demand your full and undivided attention at all times, it can make life very hard for the double-major student.</p>
<p>If you are thinking about "general music" then you are really looking at getting a Bachelor of Arts in music rather than a Bachelor of Music which is a performance degree. If you go the BA route, then it is quite a bit easier to do a double major in music and something else. A BA in music will give a nice background in general music and access to lessons but does not require auditions and is not as time consuming as the performance major. </p>
<p>The Peabody School of Music website has a wonderful article about the difference between the bachelor of music, the bachelor of arts in music and the double degree option. It would be helpful for the moderator of this site to tack it to the top of this forum. I don't have time to go fish for it now, but if you visit the site it is pretty easy to find. I would suggest you read it as it will help answer some of your questions.</p>
<p>Those excellent articles on the Peabody web site can be found at <a href="http://www.peabody.jhu.edu/692%5B/url%5D">http://www.peabody.jhu.edu/692</a> and <a href="http://www.peabody.jhu.edu/787%5B/url%5D">http://www.peabody.jhu.edu/787</a></p>
<p>Be sure to look at the requirements of a given program, though.
If double-majoring sounds appealing, look at how many units are required and then plot out how this might work out.
If you're an excellent student now, assume you can take 16-18 units/semester, but if you're more average or less driven (or want to do outside activities/work), you might want to assume you can only take 15-17 (or less) units/semester.
Then figure out how long you can afford to attend college (is 5 yrs too long? music & science can be hard in less than 5!)
At 16 units/semester, you can complete 128 units in 4 yrs (w/o summer school), so this will influence how many you can take.
Ultimately, figure out what is possible for you to complete in a given time period.
This will help to determine where you might be able to go since BA music and BA/BS lab science programs vary in size.</p>
<p>UNC-CH did not used to be accredited by NASM (do not know if this is the case now), but it probably means that the music degree curriculum is not distributed with the preferred emphasis. That being said, it also probably means that it is easier to do double degree there, more liberal arts in core curriculum. It would not hurt admission to graduate school, however, because that would be based on courses taken and auditions. There are some excellent music faculty members there, highly respected, and graduates from there are very successful musicians.</p>
<p>UNC Greensboro, Pembroke and Wilmington are accredited by NASM but not Chapel Hill.</p>
<p>Appalachian State has a very large music school, excellent music ed program, highly respected and accredited. Of course, ECU and North Carolina School of the Arts are accredited, too. I spoke only of UNC-CH because OP mentioned it.</p>
<p>Accreditation aside, UNC-CH has a very fine musicology program and some of the performance faculty is quite good. I don't know how their ensembles are, though.</p>
<p>Help! My son is a junior in H.S. He has been taking bass guitar lessons for a little over a year. He wants to major in music. What will he do with a major in music? He's thinking of performance/history or theory.
Where do we start?</p>
<p>The standard bit of advice to performance majors is to do something else, anything else unless music is what you simply HAVE to do.</p>
<p>What kind of music does he like to play? If a Jazz program does not appeal to him, there are not a lot of schools where he can major in electric bass. McNally Smith, Berklee, and Musicians Institute come to mind. He has started very late for a performance major and would probably have a lot of catching up on basic technique if he were to go to one of those schools. Some commercially-oriented schools have no problem taking on an intermediate level player who can pay full tuition, but you have to ask yourself whether your son is the type who would benefit from such training.</p>
<p>The old joke about Berklee students runs something like, "What do they call students who are failures at Berklee? Graduates." The whole point behind those schools is that they are about making industry connections and getting paying jobs, and the degree is a secondary consideration. The percentage of entering students who graduate is fairly small compared with traditional college programs in the arts and sciences.</p>
<p>In order to support himself playing bass, your son will need to master his technique, learn how to play in a lot of different styles and be prepared to spend lots of time in self-promotion and looking for work. By the way, that is after turning in a regular shift at whatever day job he takes to support himself while trying to build a music career. If this does not sound like what he wants to do, then he really should start looking at other careers.</p>
<p>I don't mean to be discouraging, but these are the realities of the popular music industry for nearly all of the kids who think they are going to be the next Jaco Pastorius or Scott LaFaro. Is he at all interested in computers? Perhaps a music technology major would be of interest. If he has an interest in business, perhaps a music industry program would suit.</p>
<p>Two books you both should read are "The Music Business" by Dick Weissman and "This Business of Music" by Krasilovsky, Shemel and Gross. Both are a bit dated in that they are not keeping up with the very latest technologies, but they will give you some insight into the issues faced by working musicians.</p>
<p>I think it was Chuck Berry who said something like, "If I had it to do all over again, I would go to business school first then learn how to play the guitar."</p>
<p>Can anyone tell me how much emphasis is placed on the S.A.T. test scores. Also, can anyone tell he what is considered a good grade on the new S.A.T.'s. I know they are supposed to be harder than the old S.A.T.'s, is that taken into consideration.</p>
<p>Emphasis on SAT's varies considerably by school. Some music schools (particularly stand-alone conservatories and specialty schools) either do not require it at all or use it to screen for those whose English skills are not very good. Even there, they may use it more to determine who needs a particular English class, rather than as a criterion for admission. Others, particularly those associated with top academic schools like Rice or Carnegie Mellon, place much more weight on SAT's. </p>
<p>For a performance major, the audition is the single most important element in the admission decision at almost every school.</p>