<p>If your son loves the marimba, then he’s probably playing music written by Mark Ford, who is a professor at North Texas. My S auditioned there and loved the school. They take a lot of percussionists every year-not sure of the acceptance rate since there are also a lot of auditioning percussionists too. But I don’t think anyone that auditions percussion at UNT considers it a “safety” school</p>
<p>Kent State has a brilliant percussion teacher Ted Rounds as does Boston University they have Tim Genis and Lee Vincent of the Boston Symphony. Univ of Illinois Champaigne Urbana has William Moersch another famous marimba soloist. UNT has a huge undergrad program. My son’s teacher went there. He started with over 100 in his freshman class of percussion majors and 6 graduated. Peabody is a difficult entry and the teacher there also teaches at Yale and Curtis (I’ve heard he’s only there 1 day a week). A really good freshman at Ithaca last year audtioned at Peabody and was rejected.</p>
<p>[About</a> the CWRU Department of Music](<a href=“Department of Music | Case Western Reserve University”>Department of Music | Case Western Reserve University)</p>
<p>Have you looked at Case Western Reserve? (OH) as a possibility? </p>
<p>With your son’s stats & his personal requirements & your need for financial aid, you may end up having to compromise! Best of luck!</p>
<p>This has been answered very thoroughly and thoughtfully by others below (or above, depending on one’s CC viewing settings!) but I wanted to add what I keep reading in the theater section of this board- there is really no such thing as an auditioned safety. That said, yes, it depends on your son’s level, which is something we can’t determine here. Once he has an assessment and you know what ballpark he is in, you can move towards selecting programs that are going to be an easier reach.</p>
<p>DD could tell which ones were closer to a safety by the audition requirements. Those that were easier were more likely to be a safety since she could do the more demanding ones. Not surefire for everyone but it worked for her. One of hers just had a requirement to sing something in a language other than English and something else, Broadway song was OK. That was by far the easiest of the requirements. Also one of her “safeties” had a rolling admission and she had her acceptance before Christmas with some nice merit money. So even though it was audition based, it was not that tough. The audition just really weeded out those that had no experience or couldn’t sing at all. There was a pretty good teacher there so she would not have minded going to that one. It stayed in the running until the end.</p>