<p>My sop daughter is going into vocal performance and needs a smaller, more insular environment for her education. She thrives in performance venues, and is looking for a college where she can be very active. She has participated in choir, marching band, symphonic band, percussion ensembles, jazz choirs, is an excellent pianist and has been actively composing for a few years. She needs a college that has alot to offer on a small compus. </p>
<p>We are looking at Westminster Choir College, St. Olaf, Millikin, Luther and Lawrence. Any suggestions on these or other smaller colleges or conservatories?</p>
<p>If your D likes choral work, that will probably provide the bulk of her performance opps during her undergrad years, so make sure that you check out the ensembles at each school and which are open to underclassmen. If she chooses to continue playing an instrument in college find out if the groups are open to VP majors. She may have to pick and choose which fit into her schedule but I’m sure she’ll have a great time!</p>
<p>While Rice does have university in its name, it is actually quite small: about 3200 undergrads which is not much bigger than St. Olaf (which has about 3150 undergrads). Because Rice has a separate school of music and because of its residential system, it actually seems much smaller and more personal than many schools that are smaller than it. Certainly the music and academics at Rice are outstanding.</p>
<p>I don’t know what the vocal program is like at Oberlin, but Oberlin is smaller than St. Olaf and similarly located in a small town in the middle of corn fields. Oberlin has tons of performing opportunities and tons of performances. Because it has a conservatory, students feel a part of a much smaller community.</p>
<p>We had basically ticked Rice off the list, but if it is indeed a smaller music school, we will check it out! Thanks for the tip! I know they are VERY highly regarded for VP</p>
<p>Thank you for posting Mezzo’s Momma! I know she will have to scale back, and she’s been told she will have to scale back, but we’ll see how much scaling back gets done! I remember how busy I was as a music major, but I loved every minute of it!</p>
<p>Peabody is <400 undergraduate students. The conservatory has it’s own campus, one square city block,about 3 miles from the Johns Hopkins main campus.</p>
<p>St. Olaf is a nice small college. I live not too far from it. Lawrence is great too.</p>
<p>I’m attending Illinois Wesleyan U, also a small liberal arts college with a School of Music in Bloomington, IL. 2,100 undergraduate students. About 200 music majors, and about 1/4 or so of students involved in music in some way. </p>
<p>One I looked at (for piano performance) was Concordia, which is very big on the vocal end of music. I don’t know a lot about the program though, but their choir is very good, I’ve heard them. Around 2800 students (mostly undergrad, a couple hundred grad students but not in music), I think it’s 250+ music majors, and 1/3 of students involved in music in some way. If you can deal with cold winters, you could look at it- Moorhead, MN, on the border with ND.</p>
<p>Rice’s vocal program is kept very small. They have about 16 singers total for all undergrad voice majors. If you have any questions feel free to PM me.</p>
<p>^Yep. If you have any questions, you can always ask me. I might not know if it’s a question specific to vocal performance, though, but I could answer general stuff that applies to any incoming music major at IWU.</p>
<p>I’m a vocal major at Luther. It’s a small school (2500 students) with about 1000 musicians. I’m biased, of course, but being as objective as I can, it sounds like Luther has everything you’re looking for. We have about 15 voice faculty, and we have 6 major choirs, three of which tour annually (Nordic, Collegiate, and Cathedral). Our freshman men’s choir, Norsemen, performed the national ACDA conference in Chicago last spring, and the women’s counterpart, Aurora, is (I think) performing at regional ACDA this year. Nordic Choir is touring twice this year - once locally and once in the UK and Ireland.
We also have three concert bands, a jazz band, a jazz orchestra, and two orchestras. Concert Band and Symphony Orchestra both tour nationally or internationally every year. Symphony does a month in Vienna every three years.
Christmas at Luther is a gigantic big kind of deal every December. We work on the music for a few months beforehand and there are about three weeks of massive mass choir rehearsals with about 550 singers and 50 or so instrumentalists.
We also produce an opera every year. This year we did Street Scene by Kurt Weill.
We have a pretty good (growing) composition program headed by Dr. Brooke Joyce. There are several student composer recitals each semester, and Dr. Joyce has a composition studio that your daughter could probably be a part of as a freshman.
Music is just a vitally important part of the campus. Music majors are required to attend 12 recitals per semester for 7 semesters, but you could easily double or even triple that. It’s so much fun being in a place where every last person appreciates music.
I’ll also add that our academics aren’t bad either. We tend to get overlooked by big lists, but we’re absolutely on par with St. Olaf (which is also a school you need to look into very seriously).</p>
<p>I strongly, strongly encourage you to visit and sit in on an Aurora, Norsemen or Nordic rehearsal. Or come watch Christmas at Luther. It’s always the same, if students take the time to visit campus, they love the pants off it. Decorah is a little out of the way, but it’s worth your time to come check us out. :)</p>
<p>My D ended up choosing Oberlin Conservatory because she can double major at the College and the ensembles were appealing. She also loved WCC, but found it a little too small.</p>
<p>The Oberlin voice program is pretty strongly biased toward Opera. If her interests are not in that direction, she would need to be very careful about teacher selection there. As at many music schools, admissions is very selective, particularly for sopranos if she happens to be one. I have heard that the selection process takes into consideration what the school needs for its upcoming performances, so there can be relatively fewer or relatively more openings for a specific voice type depending on who has recently graduated and what productions are being planned.</p>
<p>In addition to the schools mentioned so far, you may want to investigate Concordia in Moorhead MN.</p>