About college majors…please help me?
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What’s great about excellent music schools is that if you’re accepted at one of those, the general feeling is that you’ve mastered your instrument (or are close…), so now it’s time to move on to understanding the music.
Classical music is very technical by nature, much more so than pop or rock for example. Similarly, jazz has great structure but allows for immense variation about that structure. Pop/rock is much more formulaic and allows for much less variation than say jazz.
So you’ve probably heard the old cliche… that if you can play orchestral music, you can play anything. The reason people say that is that *understanding* orchestral music to the point where you can write it, play it, take it apart and put it back together again, etc., gives you abilities that people who can only play just don’t have. It adds dimensions to your performance that others will never achieve.
So… look into great jazz schools, and don’t overlook traditional schools:
Indiana University
U. North Texas
U. Kansas
Eastman
And if you’re a guitar player… You might see if GIT is the place for you (www.mi.edu).
Good luck!
Indiana University.
University of South Florida.
University of North Florida.
All these have great jazz studies programs that are populated by young faculty members with open minds about music. If you’re looking to spend four years mastering the theory and extensive scholarly history of rock-n-roll while playing in a heavy metal band, well maybe you should think about why serious academic institutions don’t offer that. It’s because intellectually — in terms of both scholarship and artistry — there isn’t nearly as much there.
