Posted by Klaus on November 02, 2001 at 01:02:06:
In Reply to: Second-guessing myself...(long) posted by Ted on November 01, 2001 at 23:33:25:
Very rarely will I post on US upper level educational matters. But this one is not specific for the US.
You acted by two levels of motivation, that pointed in the same direction. Ergo you did, what you found right for you. That should not be considered silly in any way.
What might be silly, would be a situation, where you are second-guessing yourself so much, that you do not get the optimum out of the potentials at your present school.
Specific education also will broaden ones general foundation for making decisions.
If the teaching of your present school develops you to a level, where you are very conscious that further developments should happen on schools B, C, or D, then make such a decision. But do not make it until you are fully ready to make such a very specific and well researched decision.
At the present stage of development you might very well have ended up doing as much second-guessing, had you gone to school B. Because you would have been uncomfortable there.
Practise, play in ensembles, follow classes, write whatever papers you are obliged to.
No musician has ever been hurt by having his ears developed.
Music history is considered boring by many students. It is so. If it is about Wagner’s marriages and such matters.
If music history is about how music was written and played in different periods. About which tricks of the trade composers used. And about how diverse developments in society made composers respond in different ways. then music history is very interesting.
And teachers can contain very diverging aspects in one and the same person. When I studied musicology, I found it immensely interesting to study Schoenbergs atonal, but pre-serial, compositions and Bach’s harmonisations with one certain professor. But his course in Schoenberg as a composer was extremely boring. Because it mainly concentrated on psychological aspects of the interaction between Schoenberg and his surroundings. That was nothing for me, so I dropped out from that course.
Another professor made a hopeless topic as the music of the early moddle age very interesting.
My point is: Grab whatever your present school can give you in your present situation. You hardly can avoid getting wiser.
Then use that wisdom for further decisions.
All the best
Klaus