https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2NuDmQSKQvw
A video from a grad student who has answered the criticisms a few times.
I did not relate to the answers. I heard, “music majoring is fine because you can jump out of music whenever you want.”
Ha! Yes . . . you will be appealing to law schools is not exactly a selling point as there are more newly minted law school grads than there are jobs in law.
This comes up all the time, that music is somehow a ‘wasted degree’, and in large part it is a combination of how difficult it is to make a career in music, along with the idea that college these days is a job training exercise, that the only thing it is about is studying things directly tied to jobs…the reality is that a lot of people end up working in fields not related to their undergraduate degree, the guy that founded the company I work for in the financial industry was a chemical engineering graduate, the guy who runs the business unit I am in now was likewise an engineer,but he is running a business unit.
My answer would be that if a kid has a real passion for music, that they really want to put the effort in, know how hard it is, that being young it is a good time to try and find your passion, and that having been able to do that, even if it turns out they don’t do music as a career, at least they can look back on something they tried for themselves, rather than doing what others tell them ‘is the way to go’. Not to mention that getting into a decent music school requires a huge committment, a self committment, in terms of practicing and getting to the goal, it is a lot harder to get through an audition to a music school then it is getting in academically, with an academic admit you at least know that you need to get good grades, good test scores, the EC’s, etc, and while there is serendipity in academic admissions (ie among x number of kids with hyper stats, why some get into Harvard and most don’t), with an audition it is almost entirely serendipity, you know you have to play well, but there is no way to know what the panel thinks in fact playing well means…and going for a goal with ambiguity in of itself is a valuable life lesson. And once in music school, there is no magic plan of ‘follow this, and you will become a working musician’, in college you know that you take X classes to get a degree, that you declare a major, you take courses in the major, and the goal is to get good grades, and then you get internships, and you have a decent chance of getting a job. With music, you don’t have that, you have to decide how much to practice, you have to balance the needs of individual preparation with ensemble work, you have to try and look at the ‘real world’ and see what it takes to be a working musician.
Put it this way, when a kid graduates from an academic college, there is a lot more that is concrete about the process, the employer knows this is an entry level position, that the kid doesn’t know a lot, so they look at things like GPA, internships and so forth to make a decision. When a kid who is a music major auditions for a position in an orchestra or plays for someone to get a gig, the other person doesn’t think “hmm, kid is out of school, okay, so he isn’t perfect’, they will say 'next!”.
@musicprnt - what you say makes more sense to me, and I think is a better and more direct and possibly eye-opening answer to one who would “object” to another’s choice to major in music. I asked S the question I see here often, “Can you see yourself doing anything other than music for a living?” He cautiously said, “Music education.” He said, “I would rather live kind of poor to do music.”