Posted by Kenneth Sloan on December 18, 2003 at 15:15:58:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Re: Teaching and reality posted by Rick Denney on December 18, 2003 at 11:33:25:
Hear! Hear!
Rick is absolutely correct.
An undergraduate major should *never* be chosen because "it will prepare me for a job". It won't. Students who think that way will be disappointed (and, by the same token, teachers and colleges who encourage that kind of thought are frauds).
Study music performance because you want to know more about music performance - not because you think it will qualify you for a job. Also, please pay attention to the question of whether or not you are *enjoying* the study of music performance. One of my stock pieces of advice for students is: if you don't enjoy what you are doing as a student, you will *hate* what you are doing in your job!
Rick compares the study of music performance to the study of mathematics, or physics. I think he's wrong there. I think that a better comparison might be to the study of football performance. Consider - you spend a disproportionate amount of time practicing, building, and demonstrating skills in front of an audience; the best of your colleagues will go on to professional careers and be rich and famous; and the rest of you will look around after 5 years and say "why didn't they tell me that I wouldn't be able to cut it in the pros?"
Nothing wrong with that - just as there's nothing wrong with majoring in Classic Greek Literature. (ZERO graduates with a B.A. go on to a career in Classic Greek Literature, but many of them go on to interesting and rewarding careers...in something else!)
If you love to play football, and you are good at it, many colleges will recruit you, put you through an audition, and pay you to perform for them for 4 years. Why should they treat the members of the Tuba-Euphonium Studio any differently?
That's a better deal than the students in the Mathematics Department are getting! About the same perecentage of undergraduate mathematics students go on to distinguised careers as professional mathematicians. Yet, they study it anyway. (and yes...some of them "fall back" on careers as mathematics teachers - not nearly enough of them, though; most find careers in fields that they did NOT study in college)
So...if a college promises you a career in Music Performance, I will agree that they are acting irresponsibly.
But...count your blessings. A career which is strictly limited to Music Performance is no bed of roses. Most working musicians do a few other things on the side (many directly related to their performance career...some not). Do what most folk do - develop a career based on your marketable skills, and feed your love of music performance by gigging on the side...or by being one of the pillars of a community band or three.
A college degree is not a union card. It's much harder to acquire, but comes with absolutely no guarantees.
Why do colleges recruit music performance majors? Perhaps they want some music performed. Perhaps the instructors enjoy teaching music performance. Why should it have any direct relationship to the jobs taken by students after they leave the program?
Why do they make you pay for it? Perhaps it has to to with how the lives of those students will be enriched after they leave the program?