Music School Application Guide

UPDATED FOR 2022!

Interested in applying to music school but don't know where to start? This post will help you find schools to apply to based on YOUR priorities, organize your applications, and put your best foot forward in auditions.

It’s important to think about your applications as a learning process, not simply a competition. Applying to music school will make you a better performer, practicer, writer, and learner. I hope these tips will give you more time to focus on practicing, learning about schools, and developing your network.

Below, I’ll focus on some concrete tips for getting your application materials together. I’ve found that applications give students a lot of passive anxiety and get in the way of your musical preparation. As such, I wanted to focus on organization of the more logistical side of your applications.

If you’re applying to music school, I hope these tips make your work easier to read, more consistent, and more effective.

But First:

Should You Even Apply to Music School? What even IS music school? What is Music?

Hold on there! These are all good questions, if a bit too deep for a blog post. Let’s take on the first two of this in the name of framing.

First of all, studying music is about becoming a better person through the humanities, about self-actualization through the arts. As such, a music degree is really terrific training for almost any discipline. At the same time, keep in mind that your goal is to change yourself and change the world. Nothing less.

Studying music at the undergraduate or graduate level can take a number of different forms. You could take a few music classes, play in an ensemble, or take lessons while studying a different discipline. You could pursue a music degree within a liberal arts school, weaving the study of performance with a broader education around the sciences, humanities, or (almost) any other discipline. Or you could take on a performance major, narrowing your path of focus on music-specific courses to deepen your practice.

None of these experiences is objectively worse or better than the other, and there are amazing performers without music degrees, and countless examples of people studying music and moving to another field. Remember your goals above!

Your goal is to find the right balance of experiences and learning that will help you actualize your goals.

💡 Personal opinion alert: I love the contextualization and critical thinking that comes from studying music within a liberal arts context, and recommend as broad an experience as possible to those looking for undergraduate degrees. At the graduate level, focus can be helpful…

Selecting Schools: “Better” ≠ Better

Let’s say you’re convinced that studying music in college is right for you. How to decide where to apply?

In general, quality of instruction at American universities is so high that a motivated student can achieve astonishing results almost anywhere. Whereas traditionally elite institutions might tout the impact of network (sustained access to industry leaders as professors and guests), attention (smaller class size and more advising hours), resources of school (grants, opportunities for students, facilities, etc), and curation of student body (perhaps more likely to stay in professional contact with your cohort for longer), success in a music school might depend on a very different set of parameters!

Ecosystems of the Arts

Think about choosing a school as choosing an ecosystem in which you will live, grow, develop, and shine. While overall quality of school and the most amazing private teacher are certainly a part of that, they are not the only animals in the jungle. Let’s say you love collaborating with composers on new works. Perhaps a school with a strong composition program and ample opportunities to take on independent projects is critical. Maybe you want the context of studying music within a liberal arts framework, or the buzz of a big city vs a smaller town (with lower cost of living). Articulating your preferences and desires with regard to learning experience helps clarify your application journey, forcing you to be more specific in your goals. It also reduces anxiety by framing your application/audition process as one of self-actualization instead of competition.

💡 Hot tip: my belief is that for those interested in an undergraduate degree in music, an elite, top 5 school is not a requirement for professional success. A great teacher, a motivating community of peers, ample time and space to practice, and careful professional development through festivals and masterclasses, and financial burden are more important. For graduate school, where the goal is to pivot towards professionalized activities, the exposure and access of a “better” school might be what you need. But, maybe you’d rather have teaching opportunities, a low cost of living, or something else?

Here are some lenses through which you might both find schools to apply to and evaluate schools in which you’re interested. Some might be extremely important to you while others might be less of a priority.

Type of School

• Is the music program a department of music, a school of music, or a conservatory? Music departments tend to situate music within a liberal arts framework. Schools of Music offer a bounded experience within a university, allowing students to major in performance while still taking classes beyond the confines of the School. Conservatories and Institutes are the most focused, with narrow degree paths around excellence in performance.

• Type of Degree

  • In my estimation, the degree one receives is less important than the experiences contained within.

    • Undergraduates: a music performance degree (BM) is more focused and includes fewer electives than a BA. Within universities, most BA and BM degrees are similar, although you might find some variance among departments of music and conservatories.

  • Are there opportunities to double major, or take on a double degree? What about a music minor?

• Location

  • Is the school in a small college town or a bustling metropolis?

• Major Professor

  • What are the major professors in your instrument like? Are they prominent in their field? Are they specialists, focusing on one discreet area, or are they generalists, capable of guiding students down many paths? Does the school have a number of faculty in your instrument, or just one? Do students have sustained contact with faculty, or are they aloof and remote?

• Quality of School

  • Yikes! Tough one. Does the school overall offer a quality educational experience? Even if you’re interested only in music, having great science/humanities/math courses is transformative.

• Strength of Program

  • Strength can be measured in many ways. At its core, a wonderful music program engenders self-actualization through the study of music and the arts. More specifically, you might ask:

    • Does the program you are considering have a successful track record of alumni success?

    • Does the program create opportunities for its students to develop musically and engage professionally, generating meaningful networking and professional development opportunities while providing transformative musical training?

• Student community

  • Student community can be measured in many ways

    • Diversity of student body, measured by any number of parameters

    • Collaboration or interaction between students

    • Availability of student-centered activities

  • Within music schools, we typically think of interlocking circles of interaction

    • Major instrument studio: what are other studio members like? Do they get along, or is studio class a battle royale?

    • School at large

      • Many schools of music and conservatories feel like high schools, with students taking many classes with the same cohort. What’s the energy or vibe?

• Professional opportunities

  • Does the program give you opportunities to perform? To teach? To develop your craft in a meaningful way? To record yourself and develop your professional portfolio? To add to your resume?

• Time

  • Will you have sufficient time to create and develop an independent project or to allow for meaningful reflection from your experiences? (see “cost”)

• Health and wellness

  • Does the school offer resources around musician health? Are there physical therapists on staff? Can students work with audiologists? What about the school’s commitment to mental health?

• Commitment to sustainable careers

  • A good school will help you discover career pathways and take meaningful steps towards attaining them. Some thoughts to consider

  • Does the school have an office of career development, or a similar hub that combines resources around helping students both ideate career possibilities and attain them?

  • Are there courses or seminars around making a career in the arts?

  • Does the school offer help pinpointing professional goals, finding opportunities, raising funds, developing portfolios, or other career support? Does the school collate and circulate professional opportunities?

  • Does the school offer resources for students to travel to auditions or conferences, or for attending summer festivals?

  • Is there a robust network of alumni that can provide networking opportunities?

  • Does the school have an office of international programs and scholarships that will help you identify fellowships and other study abroad opportunities and mentor/guide you through the application processes?

  • If none of the above, do the faculty take a hands-on role in mentoring and guiding the students?

• Location

  • Is the school somewhere you’d like to work professionally? Since you’ll be spending significant time there, look for a geography conducive to your professional development. Is there freelance work in the area? Are there opportunities to create events? Is the location easily accessible? Is the weather good?

  • How does cost of living relate to tuition, financial aid, scholarships, and work study?

• Facilities

  • Are there plentiful practice rooms on campus? What about rehearsal spaces that students might book?

  • If you play an instrument like piano or percussion, how robust is the school’s instrument collection?

  • How accessible is the campus? Is it easy to walk, bike, or drive there?

• Exposure

  • Does the program connect you with a larger professional network? Will you have opportunities to perform in significant venues, or with prominent guest artists? Or, will you have sustained exposure to faculty who might be professional gatekeepers or enablers in your career?

• Cost

  • The true cost of college (especially music school) is tough to measure and is wrapped in a tight ball which includes return on investment, cost of living, financial aid, and a whole lot of anxiety! Some things to think about with cost:

    • Availability of Financial Aid

    • Availability of performance-specific scholarships

    • % of financial aid awarded as student loans

      • In recent years, there has been greater transparency around the practice of using loans as “financial aid.” It’s important to be specific and honest here!

    • Cost of Living

      • That “huge” scholarship from School X might be smaller than you think after factoring in cost of living in City X. I like this cost of living calculator as a rough estimate of a number of factors.How to find schools?

How to Find Schools?

Discovering schools to add to your list can be challenging. If you have a private teacher or musical mentor, speak with them to get an initial framing. Beyond that, I recommend using your priorities as a filtering and discovery mechanism. If you are interested in learning from an esteemed teacher, check where your favorite performers teach. If you are interested in a school that has strong track record of professional success, look where some of your heroes went to school. For percussionist, seeing who is active and achieving acclaim in the Percussive Arts Society scene—winning the percussion ensemble competition, faculty performing or presenting at PASIC—is an easy way to gauge potential fits.

How Many Schools Should be on your list?

The number of schools you apply for is less important than the type of schools you apply for.  Organize your list of schools by types:

1. Dream school! I already bought a sweatshirt and mug.

2. I’d love to go to this school, and stand a good chance of getting in. I’ll get the sweatshirt at orientation.

While I’m rooting for a perfect match with your dream school, all-or-nothing thinking can be dangerous. If you can, have a few schools in the second category.  You never know what might happen. A current student might stay an additional year, your favorite school might lose some funding, or they could face an influx of applicants.  To a point, applying to more schools is helpful because it maximizes your chances, and the time taken to apply for more schools is not significantly more than applying for one school (if you are organized and diligent about these).  While I don’t think it’s a good idea to apply for a school you don't want to attend, narrowing your list of “favorite” schools before you apply can be dangerous.

Why else is number of schools less important than you might think? Let’s say you are interested in east coast conservatories. If you apply to 5 similar schools, the chances that a number of other prospective students have also selected the same schools is fairly high. From my perspective, the most important metric of how many schools should be on your list is meaningful diversity of applicant pool.

Organizing your Applications

Next, I recommend making a spreadsheet organizing what you’ll need at each school.  The goal here is to do as little work as possible, so look for commonalities between schools’ requirements.  Even if you’re an organized person, having all the information in one place can give you peace of mind while you practice.

Be sure to track:

• Application Deadlines

• Link to application (for easy reference)

• Application log-in info.

  • I recommend using a password manager (I like 1 pass), but keeping track of at least your user ID on your spreadsheet can help save you time and the agony of remembering which dog’s name you used with “1” and “!”.

• Prescreening repertoire.

  • Not all schools require prescreening recordings. If you’re applying to a school that does, prioritize the videos since most faculty members will look at them first. Here, the goal is to see what might work for multiple schools what might work for multiple schools. Keep in mind, some schools might have different technical requirements for pre-screening tapes, requiring a single take vs accepting multiple videos for pieces.

• Personal statement required?

• CV or Resume required?

• Transcript sent?

• Number of recommendation letters required?

You can use a spreadsheet to track your progress getting the applications together. Here’s a barebones one I made:

Time Management

Give yourself due dates for each of these steps to minimize your stress and get parts of your application out of the way as soon as possible. Ideally, you’ll want to leave plenty of time to record your pre-screening videos (if necessary), the most significant part of the application process outside of the live audition. Here’s a sample timeline, presuming a December 1 deadline:

• As soon as possible:

  • Solicit letters of recommendation. Ask your recommenders permission to list them on your applications, and be careful to note whether the school solicits letters directly or if you have to collate and send letters.

• October 18—November 1

  • Write and revise draft of personal statement

  • Complete draft of CV or resume and send to someone for comments

  • Log into application website for each school. You never know what surprises you might find there!

  • Organize your transcripts

• November 15-21

  • Record the prescreening, giving yourself extra time to edit, re-record if needed and finalize the file exports

  • Upload video files to YouTube or school-recommended file service

• November 22-24

  • Submit applications, leaving extra time to double, triple, quadruple check your materials

With rigorous deadlines for the “paper” elements of the application, you can spend more time practicing. For those concerned with their writing, leaving extra time to have a trusted advisor or peer read and offer comments is essential. Not sure how long these written elements will take? Use the Pomodoro Technique! If you don’t need to record prescreening videos, spend this time practicing!

Remember, this timeline might not work for you. What matters is that you think about getting parts of your applications out of the way with regularity instead of doing most of the work at the end of the process.

Audition Repertoire

What should you play for your audition repertoire? As little as possible

Look for repertoire that meets as many schools requirements as possible, so you can focus your energies on presenting your best possible performances.

Faculty tend to look for well-rounded performers with strong fundamentals and some degree of interest towards one or more disciplines.  Unless the school to which you are applying has a strong speciality, plan a program that shows your versatility while highlighting your strengths.

I recommend to my own students that they work to stretch themselves in some areas while picking familiar repertoire in others. For percussionists, that might mean a keyboard solo that’s challenging to you combined with a snare drum solo that shows your chops.  You don’t have to learn all new music for the audition—I’d rather my students spend their time refining their performances, since the recording process adds significant drag.

Absent specific requirements, I recommend selecting repertoire that would be familiar to the faculty at your schools.  The faculty are trying to evaluate your musicianship, and it’s easiest to do so with repertoire they know.  While your curatorial sensibility is important to the work you’ll do at your school, if you select a newer or relatively unknown work, buttress that selection with other opportunities to evaluate your core skills. Show off your tone, touch, musicianship, and interpretation, not your anxiety!

Be YOU!

One of the great joys of teaching these days is the breath and diversity of interests my students bring to bear on their practice. Songwriting, pop music experience, non-western musical cultures, extracurricular collaborations, interdisciplinary work: In my opinion, these interests form a significant part of one’s musical personality and should be highlighted.

Let’s say you are interested in a career of creating and facilitating new collaborations. Showing your ability to do so is actually the thing that’s going to help you the most getting into school, instead of just lobotomizing yourself to play what other people play. If you think of your audition in this way, you are no longer in competition with others. Instead, you are striving to be the best version of yourself, and that’s a powerful reframing.

While many music schools have fairly narrow audition repertoire, there are ways to show your other skills:

• ASK! Don't be afraid to ask if you can present something outside the schools written audition repertoire. As I wrote above, you are looking for the best ecosystem in which you can thrive. Measuring the faculty's response to your desire to show your musical personality can be a powerful indicator. Along that vein. if you are waging war on a school’s audition requirements, perhaps that means it’s not a great fit? Just saying…

• If the school asks for a solo work, present that piece you commissioned, or a work that shows off the best facets of your playing or your engagement with non-Western musical cultures

• Send some supplemental videos highlighting your work, either when you are in contact with the faculty ahead of your audition (see below) or as part of your pre-screening or remote audition materials.

• Bring it up at the audition or interview

Don’t be afraid to be bold here!

Plan out your practice

Give yourself benchmarks along the way to make sure you stay on track learning and refining notes. Strive to know where you are in your learning process at each step of the way. Like many others, I use charts to organize my repertoire learning. However you do it, keeping your practice organized will help eliminate the kind of anxiety and strain that impedes your daily work.

Likewise, don’t do everything at once. Learning music is challenging, and having too much music in an early learning stage at once is a recipe for forgetfulness. I recommend that students work to get one or two pieces into a refinement stage before learning more repertoire, to ensure that your development is “sticky.”

Pre-screening Recordings

Some of the schools on your list might require pre-screening recordings. Some tips

Start recording yourself ASAP

I’ve written here about the essential value of recording to practicing. With pre-screening tapes, recording yourself helps prepare you for the actual recording session. Just as you might play through a recital before going on stage in front of an audience, before you track your tapes, set up some mics and give yourself a recording rehearsal. Make sure to wear your recording clothes. Listen critically to what you record to make concrete changes to your approach. At the same time, watch carefully to see how your visual presentation aligns with your perceptions. Giving yourself a little bit of time to make meaningful tweaks can ensure that you sound and look your best on your recording.

Recording can be stressful, so prepare early!

Use a Producer

While it’s certainly possible to record yourself, having a friend or colleague serve as a producer can allow you to focus on playing your best without critiquing yourself mid-take.  At the same time, a producer who knows you well can help manage your energy level during long recording sessions. A friend or colleague in the room can also mitigate that special flavor of performance anxiety: recording anxiety.

Find someone to help you engineer

Some percussionists are terrific audio engineers and videographers.  For those that aren’t, invest if you can in your recordings.  This could mean paying a professional to record you, or trading favors with a friend.  Having a great sounding and looking recording reduces the effort it takes to hear YOU, and highlights your playing.  At the same time, the pressure if having a limited amount of time with your engineer helps keep you on track and professional.

Takes/Titles

Check with each school as to whether they want an unedited take, or different videos for each piece.  While most schools allow you to type in information, including titles on your video is a helpful redundancy for tech-challenged faculty.

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Application Strategies

Next, I’d like to give some tips for getting your application into shape. The goal is to let the audition committees hear you at your best while showing how your experiences have prepared you to become a valuable member of the community at their school.

Let’s tackle each of these items one at a time:

Grades and Test Scores: they matter!

Last year I buried this deeper, but I believe now that it’s important to highlight.

Do music schools look at grades?  Yes, but not in the way you might think.

For those applying to undergraduate programs, your grades and test scores matter. A LOT! In fact, investing in your grades and test scores can have a huge financial impact on your college experience.

University schools of music will generally offer prospective students academic scholarships—based on grades and financial need—alongside music scholarships, which are determined by audition.  Odds are that the academic scholarships will be larger, so it behooves you to work to keep your GPA up.  Similarly, many public universities will offer incredible financial incentives to students within a top percentile of their graduating class—in many states, if you score within the top 15-10% of your graduating class or within a percentile on the ACT/SAT, in-state tuition can be free. Make sure to file a FAFSA!

For graduate school, I use undergraduate transcripts to identify trends. Universities vary widely in terms of grading procedures, so I like to look for broader trends and outliers (that D- in Ancient Greek, for example) as a way of supporting a candidate’s application case.

Don’t fret on this, but make sure you order your transcripts early so they don’t hold your application back.

The Rest of the Application

While your pre-screening is undoubtably the most important part of your application, don’t sleep on the rest.  At their best, your personal statement, CV, and recommendation letters will highlight your professional ambitions, mitigate the weaknesses in your playing, or help situate your playing along a continuum of growth. Without a little bit of attention, these other documents can raise more questions than they answer.

My advice is always to get as many of these application tasks out of the way as quickly as possible (see my timeline). This allows you to spend more time revising your work and more time PRACTICING for the audition, researching schools, making contact with the faculty, taking lessons, and playing mock auditions. As someone who has coached writing for a number of years, a little bit of effort here goes a looooooong way! Let’s break it down:

Personal Statement

Check if a school has specific requirements about a personal statement.  Absent specific topics, I recommend using the document to articulate your professional goals, describe the work you’ve done so far, and make an argument for how the faculty and school will help you attain effectively reach your objectives.  Your application will typically be read by the faculty evaluating your audition, so think of it as a way to prime the committee for your pre-screening recording and live audition. If you don’t feel comfortable in a facet of your playing, perhaps speaking to it on the personal statement could help contextualize the weakness as an area for growth while demonstrating your potential for clear-headed evaluation.

Your statement should be clear and easy to understand.  Good writing takes time, but bad writing takes time to read. Try to speak to each of the 5Ws: Who, What, Where, Why, and When.  Work to give your application urgency: why does this have to happen NOW?

Some ideas:

• Describe your personal and professional goals

• Describe and reflect upon what you’ve done so far to address those goals

• Articulate a struggle you might have faced along the way and how you are addressing or overcoming the hardship

• Make an argument for how you would be a great fit for the school. Describe with specificity what you would do in the degree, and how you might envision your relationship with the faculty? No need to flatter the faculty, but work make your case concretely.

CV/Resume

The CV is a list of professional activities, with descriptions providing contextualization, intended to provide a complete picture of your work.  A resume is shorter—typically 1-2 pages—and highlights work experiences, skill sets, and achievements.

From the standpoint of the audition committees, several tips:

• Organization is everything

  • If your CV or resume is well-organized, audition committee members can quickly peruse your work and educational experience and get a broad sense of your background. There’s a subconscious element here as well: success in music school often depends on being organized, and having a clear CV can subtly project that you are clear thinking.

• Be clear about dates

  • CVs are organized in reverse chronological order, with most recent activities listed first. Make sure your formatting allows the dates of your activities to be clearly visible

• Give the details

  • Be clear and detailed with regards to your work. Describe the duties at jobs you’ve held in a way that situates the work. If you were a teaching assistant at a school, what were your duties? If you taught at a school, Likewise, help readers get a sense of the significance of performances you list.

Get help with your writing!

Don’t be afraid to seek out help in writing. Seeking coaching demonstrates your commitment to your goals and saves time, allowing you to focus more energy on practicing!

If you’re in high school, your school guidance counselors or English teachers are a good place to start. If you are enrolled in a university, your school’s writing center is a great resource.

You might also think of working with an independent writing coach.

#didyouknow : I have coached writing for 15 years, and have found that 1 session can allay a lot of fears and save lots of time.

Recommendation Letters

Why am I about to spend so much space talking about recommendation letters? Since college auditions are notoriously short, recommendation letters are an easy way to frame your skill and character, buttress your application and audition, and support your case for admission. Faculty will read them, and compare notes with the recommender with regard to your playing, writing, and engagement.

Ideally, a recommendation letter waves your flag while speaking honestly to your strengths and weaknesses. A good recommendation letter can support your applications case, speaking to your strengths and weaknesses. A fantastic letter describes how your weaknesses will be addressed at the school in question while highlighting how the school will allow you to become the best version of yourself, articulating specific waypoints and details that buttress your case.

Who to Ask

It follows, then, that you want your recommenders who know you well and will write emphatically on your behalf. While it’s great to procure a letter from an extremely well known member of your field, a well-crafted argument from a mentor or professor with whom you’ve worked closely can be more powerful.  Who to ask?  Thank about balancing between:

• Fame/Expertise/Relationship with faculty to whom they are writing

• Knowledge of your work

• Knowledge of the degree to which you’re applying or other institutional connection

Some combination of the above three is desirable, or a heavy dose of one.

Some ideas:

• Private teacher(s)

  • Without a doubt, ask your current private teacher. Your teacher and mentor will write directly and clearly to the faculty at your chosen schools and make your case. As a member of audition committees, I would be wary of a student applying without a letter from their teacher. If your school has more than one teacher with whom you’ve worked closely, get them all involved where possible.

  • Percussionists with whom you’ve worked at previous institutions, summer festivals, or other activities are also great options. If you’re asking someone you don’t see regularly, make sure to keep them up to date on your progress, and be clear about what you’d like them to say (see below)

• Large Ensemble Conductor

  • A conductor can speak to your preparation in large ensembles. Because percussionists interact with large ensemble conductors more frequently than other instrumentalists, there’s a good chance that they will know your work.

• Classroom faculty

  • A professor or teacher with whom you’ve worked in a seminar or other class can speak to your academic preparation for a graduate degree, your capacity to grow, and the insightfulness of your ideas. Look for classes in which you had strong interactions with the faculty.

• Someone who knows you well

  • Work supervisor? Colleague? Collaborator? Each can be a terrific resource. If you ask someone who is less well versed in college applications to write on your behalf, be sure to help them understand the role of their letter in your application process so their recommendation can speak to your role in a collegiate environment.

Don’t despair if you don’t have any of the above people available.  Remember, recommendation letters highlight YOU, not the recommender.  A thoughtful letter from someone who knows you well and can speak to your work ethic and capacity for growth is more than enough.

Bonus points!

Look for recommenders who have some institutional connection to or personally know the faculty at the school to which you’re applying.  Someone who has a DMA from School X can speak directly and with detail about your ability to succeed at School X, and can be a powerful advocate.

More Tips

• Divide and Conquer

  • Letters are time consuming to write, and most faculty members take them very seriously. Ideally, you want someone who will write a unique letter for each school to which you’re applying, and to be able to speak specifically to why you would be a good git. To reduce strain on non-percussion faculty, I recommend brainstorming a larger pool of recommenders, and asking some to write only to a few of your schools.

• Tell your recommenders what to write

  • I appreciate it when those asking for recommendations help me frame my writing by providing information about how fit into their plans. Something like “I’d like you to speak to my perpetration for the academic component of the degree” or “would you please talk about our experiences at summer festival X” can be extremely powerful. You might also describe how the school fits into your professional plans, and ask the recommender to speak to your future work. Here’s an example: “I’m interested in school X because of their focus on Y and Z. Could you speak to my ability to do Y and Z, based upon my work in your seminar last semester?”

Keep in mind that not all faculty members are keen on this idea, so gauge their willingness based on your previous interactions.

Standing Out

Don’t be a stranger

Undergraduate and graduate auditions are short! If you are thinking of spending 2 or 4 years working with a faculty, 20 minutes is not a lot of time to assess fit. Strive to interact with the faculty and students at the schools to which you are applying both in advance of and after your audition.

Schedule a lesson with the faculty wherever possible.

Whether in person or remotely, a lesson or meeting is a great what to evaluate your fit with the faculty at each school.  Does the professor communicate in a way that suits your learning style? Do they make insightful and helpful comments? How you engage and interact with the faculty is arguably more important than prestige or renown.

More importantly, scheduling a session with the faculty allows you to demonstrate growth and development in your audition.  If a faculty member makes a comment and you’re able to address the comment between the lesson and your audition, you’ve shown what kind of student you might be and potentially ingratiated yourself.

Be bold and creative here. If you don’t have the funds to travel to the school, ask the faculty member if they might be in your region at some point in the future. See if you can send them a recording and then receive some comments on a live Zoom call. Perhaps the teacher has a student in your area that you could meet with? Maybe you’ll see one another at PASIC?

Get in touch with current students.

Ask the faculty if they might put you in touch with current students or recent alumni of the school.  Speaking with your future studio mates is the best way to get honest, hands-on information about what studying at a school is like and what challenges or concerns you’ll face while on campus.

Final Thoughts

Have fun!

If you made it this far, maybe fun is a sliding scale.

Seriously!? Seriously. Remember, you’re choosing to make music part of your professional life. Music is a tough business, but it’s filled with passion, joy, and energy. Rather than approach your auditions with a sense of existential dread, or feeling like the man from Operation, reframe the process: you are embarking on a journey of intense discovery and learning. You’ll get closer to your teachers and mentors than ever, and explore the exciting possibilities of your future.

What have I left out here? Please be in touch if there’s a topic you’d like to see covered, and good luck with your applications!

Interested in working with me on your applications? I’d love to help you organize your time, assemble your work and put your best foot forward.

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Unsnared Drum: Coming in August

Big shoutout to Laura Grey and Molly Haig for the cover design!

I’m excited to unveil my debut solo album Unsnared Drum, featuring new works for snare drum from Nina Young, Hannah Lash, Amy Beth Kirsten, and Tonia Ko. Our mission was to rethink the snare drum, to ask whether the instrument could be bold, coy, suave, and elegant: in short, interesting. Each composer lived with a drum and a number of implements over an extended period of time, and the result is a collection of pieces which highlight the snare drum’s breadth of sonic possibility and depth of expressivity, revealing an instrument of drama, grace, and heart.

After three years of workshops, performances, and presentations, Unsnared Drum will be released August 20th on New Focus Recordings. I am looking forward to sharing this project with those who have been following the process from its outset and those who are new to our snare drum adventure. 

As August approaches, I’ll share more updates on the project on my website, including details of album release events in the fall.

I spent part of last week making videos of the album with Four/Ten Media, which will bring these terrific pieces to life alongside the album audio. Check out these stills from our recent video session

A gigantic thank you to everyone involved in making this project a reality!

Fall 2020 Reflection

Hi all. I hope you are healthy and safe these days. 

Last week marked the end of my first semester at Arizona State University, and the experience of beginning a new position mid-pandemic was humbling and challenging. At ASU, I was indelibly impressed by school’s leadership, my amazing colleagues, and above all our students, whose maturity and creativity inspired me every day. 

The impact of COVID-19 on universities, schools of music, and conservatories was at once universal and local.  This crisis is unique in the way it impacts everyone—we all have spent the majority of two semesters working to make sense of our place in a world suddenly bereft of cultural collisions.  At the same time, our worlds have become increasingly local: our responses to the pandemic depend on our buildings, our cities, our HVAC systems, outdoor temperatures, and the unique situations of our students and their needs.

Because I talk incessantly with my students about the importance of reflection to learning (see here), I thought I would share some of my thoughts at the end of a singular semester in a new place.

Themes/Framing

In my communication with the percussion faculty (Simone Mancuso, Shaun Tilburg, and Dom Moio) and our students over the summer, I settled on three larger frames for our work together in the percussion studio this semester: 21st century skills, community, and social change.  Vaccine aside, I was inspired to think about how to maximize our time rather than running out the clock and just talking about how great Amadinda is each studio class. (Still, they are pretty great!) In fact, I was optimistic that by focusing on big skills, we could stay on mission through the most challenging times of the semester. 

1. Back to basics and new skills

 First, I wanted to focus on technical and soft skills alongside essential practices for performing musicians: 

• Recording: I’ve written on recording before (see here), but I wanted us as a studio to focus on ways in which recording can help us as musicians: as a practice tool, as a collaborative tool, and as a tool of professional development.

• Professional Development: Since we would be spending more time on the internet and less time drumming, I wanted us to focus on some of the skills of professional development that are at times missing from percussion curricula.  Fortunately, ASU’s large ensembles were extremely active around guests, and we were able to fill in some of the more area-specific gaps, highlighting career discovery, developing portfolios, professionalizing practice routines, and networking with guests

• Collaboration: At the same time, I wanted to make sure we looked for new ways of collaborating remotely, knowing that those skills would certainly be valuable to the students in the future.

• Preparation: Since we would be spending less time together in person, this fall allowed our studio to spend time on how to prepare for musical situations.  I tried to prioritize talking about skills that could maximize lesson time: part marking, listening, practice organization, and software/hardware that reduce friction. 

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Another wild day in studio class…

Basic musicianship from our experiences last spring in Kansas, I had a sinking suspicion that Zoom might not be the best platform for minute technical adjustments to fulcrums or beating spots. As such, I wanted to return to basic principles, and make sure we focused in every lesson on the techniques of musicianship as expressed through percussion playing.  These include;

• Having strong mental representations

• Reading actively, critically, at sight

• Learning multi-modally

• Practicing Virtuosically

• Playing expressively

• Creating actively 

Here, I was really inspired by our our school-wide focus on recording, the large ensembles’ commitment to digital collaboration, and the brass area’s outrageous fecundity in the face of adversity. 

WAIT A MINUTE!

I’ve always maintained that music degrees are humanities degrees, and that musicians develop highly leveragable skills that can be applied to almost anything.  These include (among others):

• collaboration/problem solving

• task individualization

• discipline

Seems like the above “new” skills are not so new.  In fact, I felt the pandemic allowed me to speak more directly about how to use general skills in the service of myriad professional goals.  

2. Community

Inspired by the ASU charter, I wanted to make sure we focused on community this semester.  ASU claims it should assume “…fundamental responsibility for the economic, social, cultural and overall health of the communities it serves.” I took this to mean that while we want to change the world with what we do, the local environment is the exemplar of our global reach, and nothing seemed more salient than trying to take care of the students in the studio while staying safe. Sometimes all we could manage was a quick conversation about baseball or the heat (pro-tip: when in doubt in Arizona, talk about (1) how hot it is (2) how cold it is (3) will it rain? or (4) gosh, it rained!)

3. Change

 Finally, I wanted to open the door to discuss our role in social change.  The explosive events of last summer and the growing realization within the classical music field that our work is deeply restrictive and at worst perpetuates many troubling ideas about race opened the door to some meaningful conversations. Much of the energy from this summer was directed at how universities could rethink their curricula, and how to make themselves more open places.  While I don’t think we accomplished our goals, I was inspired by my students’ candor and generosity of spirit, and excited about the work we began together.

In particular, I LOVED our listening sessions, where studio members each brought a work that they felt in some way was underrepresented. Our resulting playlist is KILLER!

(On Melita Belgrave’s suggestion, I recommend Deepa Iyer’s article My Role in a Social Change Ecosystem, which asks (among other great questions):

• What role(s) do I feel comfortable and natural playing?

• What role(s) make me come alive?

• What role(s) am I often asked to step into by others? )

(SOME) CHALLENGES

Percussion studios, it turns out, are very germ-forward.  We spent a lot of time over the summer thinking about how to keep students safe while they were on campus, even if the faculty were teaching remotely.  As COVID research developed, we worked with the facilities team and the Dean to create a set of cleaning protocols, as well as a more organized and restrictive practice room sign out system.  We also worked with students who couldn’t come to campus on either lending out school instruments or working with what they had with regards to space and instruments.  We were fortunate for guidelines from the Percussive Arts Society, as well, which helped us determine what kind of resources are needed to stay safe indoors.  This is of course not enough, and I know many students felt constrained by their access to instruments and their own personal and family health situations.  

Communication

Communication was key this semester, and a major challenge that we never really fully conquered.  Without the small talk, or running into students and colleagues in the hallways, we missed something. Trust? Banter?  Shop talk?  For my students, it was challenging to tell what information was coming from whom, and what was essential to their work.  My solution: create ANOTHER platform!

As I had done in the past, I relied on Slack for studio communication, bundling what would have been a wide swath of google docs, emails, texts, and phone calls into one moderately organized junk drawer and trying to set up the workspace to (hopefully) allow us to speak both up and across the studio. Since Slack is a bit more conversational than email, I found it allowed students to ask more directed questions more easily. At the same time, we were able to bypass the morass that is a .edu email account.

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Takeaways

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So, how did it go?

My big takeaway:

The skills of musicianship may all be learned in a remote environment. In particular, remote work is a fantastic way to develop professionalized skill sets.  BUT, the sense of community, of shared purpose that motivate percussionists to be the best version of themselves is challenging to replicate online.

Simply put: It’s possible to maintain a community remotely, but very difficult to build one over Zoom and Slack.  

Let’s look more closely:

Final projects

I made the decision to open up our traditional end of semester juries this semester. While students who wanted to record a jury performance certainly could, we made the capstone project a more flexible assignment, allowing students to create original work, engage with the community, and explore themes of interest to them.  I also wanted students to leave their lessons with something; a video they could add to their portfolio, a new collaboration, etc.   As it turns out, spending an entire semester recording oneself makes a big difference when one seeks to record a final project, and I was impressed with the leaps forward our students made this semester.  We faculty heard a variety of terrific performances, and saw much creative editing (maybe too much?). Here are some highlights:

Ryan Fowler recorded all four parts to James Tenney’s Crystal Canon for Edgard Varèse.

Jo Ramirez composed for the first time, and then recorded all the parts for a piece for a piece about eviction and its perpetuation of the cycle of poverty.

Chris Goulet wrote and recorded a piece for vibraphone and live electronics:

DMA candidate Tyler Wales continued on his quest to record all of Joe Tompkins’ French American Rudimental Solos:

And Austin Vigesaa and Robert Grahmann recorded a VERY socially distanced version of Ivan Treviño’s Catching Shadows, with some great subliminal imagery:

The jury is a terrific medium for performance majors to gradually work through nervousness and performance anxiety, but might not be ideal for everyone, especially those in degrees focused on non-performance careers (Jo and Ryan, for example, are in ASU’s Music Therapy program). Sacrosanct as they are, I want to keep this flexibility moving forward.

Percussion Ensemble(s)

My colleague Simone Mancuso and I made the decision to begin the semester remotely in Contemporary Percussion Ensemble, resuming in person whenever we and the students felt safe, or when the science developed to a point where we felt comfortable.  Since ASU’s large ensembles were also doing something similar, we didn’t want to create risky physical situations for our students through curricular overlap. 

This format was a great way to focus on the skills of chamber music: score study, rehearsal preparation, hearing multiple voices at a time. As such, I felt we were productive and on mission this semester:

•  Simone led his groups in remote recording projects over the semester, including a remote Musique de Table (!!)

• Chris Goulet, one of our percussion Teaching Assistants, worked within Bandlab, to track Julia Wolfe’s Dark Full Ride, in addition to editing and producing our entire virtual concert:

• Egha Kusuma, who has let ASU’s Pan Devils steel band for the past few years, turned his typical fall concert into an online event, tapping ensemble members to introduce the instruments in the ensemble and ably recording many of the parts himself.  If that wasn’t enough, he wrote a piece which the band premiered remotely:  

So many Eghas in there!

• For the first weeks of the semester, I presented on score study, part preparation, cueing, and gave some guided listening tours through seminal percussion chamber music.  My groups recorded their parts individually, and by listening to our terrible comps, we made interpretive decisions while hearing how individual parts fit into a group texture. In the case of Caroline Shaw’s Taxidermy, I wanted the recordings to be a way for us to study the score and prepare for an eventual in-person encounter.

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These do NOT seem to line up…

By the time we met in person, I had the sense that most students knew the works much better than they would have had we jumped into quartets immediately.  The takeaway, of course, is that students should be doing this kind of preparation with every piece they learn, and I’ll definitely keep some of these seminars moving forward.

Research/Context

In some ways, this type of semester was ideal for a teacher with my temperament.  My teaching emphasizes historical knowledge as a framework for critical thinking.  I believe knowledge of the past is essential to creating innovative new work.  This year, the ease with which we could share information digitally, and the sudden availability of a LOT of incredible digital performances meant that I was able to highlight repertoire, discuss great performances, and generally nerd out with less friction.

Recordings

Like many of my colleagues at other universities, I had students submit recordings ahead of time.  I thought this would allow us to tackle two issues at once: the need for maximal efficiency and clarity within remote lessons, and my desire for students to get more comfortable using recording as a practice and performance tool.

As I’ve written before, recording provides instantaneous, unbiased feedback about your playing. One of the central tenants of Deliberate Practice is that learning requires feedback.  When we record ourselves, feedback is immediate, and unbound to our biases about our playing.  This allows for more accurate adjustments to mental representation. 

At the same time, practice is central to learning any new skill.  If recording will be essential to my students’ professional careers (I can guarantee it will!), why not have them practice recording each week? I’ll keep this policy moving forward, since it allowed for us to get right to business in lessons and allowed for guided critical listening where necessary.

Critical Listening

Primary to the development of our mental representation is our critical listening skills.  In Peak, Anders Ericsson defines a mental representation as “a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about.” Mental representations help one diagnose mistakes and suggest change, and finely tuned mental representational skills can actually rewire the neural circuitry of our brains towards increased memory, pattern recognition, and critical thinking. While recording oneself and listening back can help develop mental representation, the most effective way is through modeling, either from your teacher or from recordings.

This semester, guided critical listening returned in force to my teaching.  Listening to music with my mentors was crucial to my development as a musician.  Studio classes or lessons with Robert van Sice often included listening to a musical excerpt, with Bob commenting on the phrasing, voicing, energy, or precision of a performer or ensemble.  These guided listening sessions helped me anchor my ears more effectively, allowed my mental representation to grow by leaps and bounds, and eventually made me a better teacher.  With the time crunch of contemporary universities, however, guided listening has disappeared from my teaching.  This semester, though, I often spent lesson time listening to students’ submitted recordings with them, pointing out things I noticed in their musicianship and technique.  While any gains in music are long-term (and I’m wary of immediate progress as it tends to point towards a too-kind learning environment) I hope to keep these sessions going forward. 

Studio Class

Since our studio class would be remote this semester, I decided to divide the time into three units: presentations from myself and the other faculty, guest presentations, and student work. Some highlights:

• Incredible session on our role in social change, which saw many studio members opening up about how we can help engender a more equitable arts community

• We held several sessions where studio members presented underrepresented music.  These turned out to be my highlights of the semester, as our studio members found amazing work that deserves a wider audience.

• I presented (well, ranted) about practice techniques, part marking, and other preparation tools

• Shaun Tilburg talked about how to dive deep into your practice and how focusing on small things can reap big rewards

• Amy Garapic presented on musical activism through percussion

• Abby Fisher talked about career paths in music and how to start preparing for your professional career while in school

• Doug Perry talked about how streaming has become a vital professional outlet and laboratory for musical development

• Simone Mancuso led us through some seminal percussion repertoire

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Not confusing at all, right?

Remote Lessons

I personally found teaching remote lessons interesting and inspiring.  It forced me to be a clearer teacher, a more resourceful thinker, and a less dogmatic musician. How?

Online lessons with mediocre internet speed (Phoenix is……slow……) tend to adopt a Victorian pacing.  Speak, wait, speak, wait, play, wait, comment, wait. So polite! In an effort to save time, I managed to partially tone down my verbosity this semester. I got better at giving verbal explanations rather than physical demonstrations (particularly for minute muscular concepts) while keeping up with assignments using a shared doc for each student, to reduce lesson time spent on finding what we did last time. (“Oh, you were supposed to learn #5? I see…”) 

Since Zoom has a tendency to offer either an audio experience or a video experience (is that a feature!?) I reckoned with my tendency to teach by sight or by dogma.

Finally, because the computer was the central device in remote lessons, we were able to explore broader projects around percussion playing.  We had students working on recording projects, composing new pieces, analyzing recordings, all of which to me enhanced their ability and acuity as percussionists.  I tried to approach each lesson as a time for shared experimentation, which freed us from the slog a bit. 

That said, remote lessons—and by extension, remote learning—are a better fit for some students than others. In conversation with colleagues across the country, we agreed that some students thrived in a more independent mode, while others benefit from the physical environment and community of a university campus. My belief is that the issue is not necessarily the technology of remote lessons, but rather the sense of engagement with a larger purpose and broader community.

Making Space

Every time I asked our students to innovate, question their beliefs, or create something new, they responded with aplomb and grace. It made me question whether in many cases, the rigidity of a school’s dogma or curriculum holds back our students from the kind of flexible thinking we want them to have.

Final Thoughts

Despite these successes, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we could have done much more. I know the student experience was challenging.  Spending many hours in front of a computer screen eliminate the physical cues that allow for saliency in university programs.  It’s hard to feel the energy of a large classroom, or that surge of excitement during a passing period before a studio class or lesson.  Clicking in and out of meetings felt miraculous in February, but dulling in October, and the lack of physical boundary between work and play wore my students down.  Small talk was eliminated, meaning that almost every interaction I had as a faculty member with my students became transactional.  No more packing up mallets after a lesson and asking about family or food.

Because I felt everyone was overwhelmed and screen time was so high that any opportunity to shut down was huge, I initially resisted  scheduling even more time with students to hear how they were doing.  In the future, I’ll look for more ways to make this more possible, as our sense of esprit de corps diminished this semester. (see above, re: students’ needs vis a vis community).

Engaging with local schools has traditionally been a significant part of our work in university music programs.  Because we couldn’t visit schools this fall, I felt a sense of isolation from the energy and optimism high- and middle-schoolers project.  True, they had their own issues, and I was new to the area, but connecting more with the community in Tempe/Phoenix remains at the top of my list for the future. 

Our studio conversations around social justice were some of the most inspiring moments I’ve had as a teacher and professor.  Inspired by our amazing HIDA leadership, my students’ desire to investigate their biases and rethink their place in the musical world was fantastic to see.  As we deviled deeper into the semester, though, I found us pivoting more towards the nuts and bolts of percussion playing, eschewing more aggressive changes to our percussion culture in favor of infrequent nudges.  While I’m sure the systemic ideas we’ve put into place—a commitment to equity in programming, for example—will help, my disappointment reminds me of my role as both a gatekeeper for and a supporter of my students.  I’m hoping to find more traction here.

More Resources

My work this semester was heavily influenced by my research into Deliberate Practice, Design Thinking, and cognitive biases.

• Read more about how some of my summer reading has informed my teaching this year.

• Check here for my thoughts on using recording technology in the practice room.

• More on the importance of reflection to the learning process.

I’d also recommend Jason Haaheim’s excellent blog, which is a nice clearing house for thoughtful and actionable ideas about practicing and craftsmanship.

I’d love to hear from others, since my perspective is of course limited. What worked, what didn’t?  What were some epiphanies around teaching percussion and—by extension—cultural literacy this semester? What can we do to think more broadly about what it means to be a musician in 2021? 

Nief-Norf

It’s been really exciting to see how Andy Bliss, Kerry O’Brien, and everyone at Nief-Norf have developed this organization into a major player in contemporary music. This weekend is their 10th anniversary, and I’m stoked to be featured on their mega marathon, with a new video of Tonia Ko’s Negative Magic, written for my Unsnared Drum project.

Check out the Nief-Norf website for the full marathon lineup!

Red

Had a blast putting together 2 movements of Marc Mellits’ Red with MikeDrop for a recent online performance. The world is full of anger, frustration, and hope these days, and I’ve been struggling to find my place as an ally and advocate. That said, making these videos helped connect people in what I hope was a meaningful way, and I’m hopeful to continue to use music as a way of healing, building community, and and sharing love. Enjoy!