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I don't know where I post this thread, the teaching thread seems more for teaching gigs and requests.
For those who went to music school at a university or majored in music, was it worth it? How did it turn out? Do you have any regrets?
I graduated from a prominent music school in the United States (I won't name it, I don't want anyone who might be on faculty there to see this and revoke my degree for criticizing the program or university) and despite the fact I was pretty miserable there for three of the four years and it's been almost 4 years since I retired from professional music altogether, I don't regret studying music there. I was able to study with one of the best jazz guitarists to have ever walked the planet as well as other professors in the jazz program that played different instruments. Private lessons, ensemble classes, and ear training classes is where I saw the most progression in my entire career. I improved so fast purely as a musician at a pace I didn't know was possible. Nowadays, I can get away with going days or weeks without practicing and not sounding rusty. With the ear training classes, of the 600 or so songs I had memorized when I was at my prime in my career, I've only forgotten about 150-200 largely due to the fact that if I can hear the melody in the head, I know what the chord changes are. I was able to study a foreign language for 2 years which turned out to be useful when I moved to Spain to teach English a few years ago. With the scholarship money I got to study there, that was contingent on me staying in the music department, going to college and graduating with a Bachelor's degree became a reality for me and opened up many doors for me since I retired from professional music in 2020, namely having one of the many credentials to teach English abroad.
That said, I was treated like the scum of the earth and like a 2nd class student by the rest of the students in the music program. I was taking fire from day one when students were mocking me for having known 150 tunes at the time when they knew about 15. There was a professor who would rant on how much he hated the guitar during his classes, and other students were emboldened by his actions to reserve the practice rooms for jam sessions but not invite or let guitarists sit in, to name-calling us, bullying us, backstabbing us, etc. There was also a sense of entitlement as a lot of the students came from extremely wealthy backgrounds. I grew up in a middle-class family and I wasn't considered part of the rest of the student body because my family's combined wealth was under ten million dollars.
While I do think and hope that things have changed, that experience of fending off personal attacks and getting bullied regularly prepared me for what was to come when I graduated and entered the professional music scene in my home town where I moved back where I experienced similar types of hostilities. I had a good career post-college all things considered with my teaching practice as slander and baseless rumors damaged my reputation in terms of gigging. I was the first guitarist in my city in a long time to come through and be able to chord solo like Wes Montgomery (choruses of block chords with a few single notes thrown in here or there) and accompany singers very well. That wasn't taken well with the established musicians, mostly pianists in town who sought to make it their mission to make an example out of me. Other singers saw guitarists could accompany them and started calling guitarists for a few of their gigs instead of pianists and other guitarists set out and hit the woodshed on being able to play chord solos which posed a threat to pianists' gigs. I was on the receiving end of a lot of slander, baseless accusations, death threats, bricks thrown through my window telling me to "go back where I came from", tires getting slashed, and the whole nine yards...
Despite all of this, I don't regret studying music, because I ended up in a great situation in the end happy as ever as an English teacher in Spain and am on a pathway to permanent residency so I never have to go back to the US except to visit my family. That said, if anyone were to ask me, I would strongly advise that folks don't study music at a university unless they are receiving a big scholarship and cannot afford to study a different field. I was lucky, of the nine guitarists in my graduating class, only one is still working as a professional guitarist in LA and touring with big-name artists, three ending up dying from drug overdoses, and the rest have left the industry and are working corporate jobs they hate.
But yeah, how was everyone else's experiences at music school? How did you guys deal with the hostilities and hate thrown your way for being guitarists? Did music school prepare you for the real world music scene?
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09-14-2024 06:44 PM
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Well, if you’d like to name the program, please don’t let that stop you because that’s not a thing. Pretty sure it would be grounds for you to sue them, even if it were practical. So please, do tell.
Originally Posted by JazzerEU
Im particularly curious because your experience sounds wild and I don’t think I know anyone who has shared it. Except maybe this part:
But that’s every elite college of any discipline ever.There was also a sense of entitlement as a lot of the students came from extremely wealthy backgrounds. I grew up in a middle-class family and I wasn't considered part of the rest of the student body because my family's combined wealth was under ten million dollars.
Assuming the truth of what you’re saying, it’s absolutely not true of the vast majority of even the most elite schools in this country so you’d be doing a service by making sure no one applies to the one that ended up like this,
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Chicago Bears fans love the player that they drafted from this school, a lot and have sky high expectations for him this season because of how early he was drafted this year and how he won the nations top award for a college football player during his time at this school.
The faculty in the music department were great at teaching and playing music, predominantly the adjunct professors. The ones in more tenured positions were good as well, but they were terrible at managing the students’ personal conduct. The professor who instilled and indoctrinated hate for guitarists had tenure and couldn’t be fired. My professor was like a father to me and was the only professor to stand up for us guitarists. I can only hope things have changed since I was a student studying there.
This program can be an attractive option for jazz guitarists because of its unique program for them and great location in a very large city, but I’d avoid studying here unless you are offered a scholarship.
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Noted.
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I was a visual art major, but I hung with (and dated a few) music majors.
Man, the music folks brought the DRAMA.
Art majors were kind of just isolationists. I painted next to a guy my whole senior year, we spoke like 3 or 4 times, we both considered each other friends, probably because we respected each other's desire to be alone and unbothered while we worked.
Those music folks knew everything about each other. They were a hell of a lot of fun, though it could get seriously messy.
That's how music is. You want to sound great, you almost inevitably need to rely on other people too. Fucking stressful.
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I went for a 1 year certificate the same year I signed up for Medicare.
Great experience and worth it.
There was a struggle to get the administration to except my 40-year-old credits from my AAS degree.
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One of my friends from music school in Texas is a guitar instructor there.
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How tf was your pro music journey so corrupt?
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There's a genuine problem with the guitar vs the piano as an accompanying instrument. That's not just political/social - but a matter of how the guitar works and sounds and how the piano works and sounds. I'm trying very hard to make the guitar work as a poly-phonic instrument after focusing for thirty years on making it work as a single-note instrument. It's some project. I like the way Pete Bernstein accompanies a singer - but I'm not even very keen on Joe Pass....
do you think there were other reasons the culture at your school was anti-guitar? did it have anything to do with the role of electric guitar in our rock 'n roll culture? (not that it's a rock 'n roll culture anymore really) - or how influenced guitarists tend to be by music that doesn't have a jazz-feel?
hard luck mate - I feel for you! I bet you can get yourself some nice quiet jazz gigs in Spain given that you know as many tunes as you do etc. - does that appeal?Last edited by Groyniad; 09-15-2024 at 07:24 AM.
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That reminded me my first music college experience, back in Russia. The professor, the head of jazz department also hated guitarists, because he thought most of them couldn't swing to save their lives. Well, he kinda was right I guess? He told me don't listen to the guys like AlDi Meola or McLaughlin, or even Joe Pass, listen to Wes. He was very specific about that haha. I asked how about Scofield? He said Sco is ok, permitted haha.
Bullying among students was also a thing. I was also bullied by my guitar teacher, the best jazz guitar player in Russia at the time, who was a legend. He had another student as his fav. Once drunk he told me forget it, you can't play and will never learn. I was hurt I said but I will practice a lot. He said 'you can jerk off all you want that's not gonna help you'. But by my graduation year I actually gained some respect from him 'cos i had no plans to give up and did learn something. In the end he gave me some good advises, and honestly i benefited a lot from studying with him. At least with the sober him haha.
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Oh yeah I mean … yeah. This isn’t the quite the same thing as the OP but this is absolutely true. Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
As the number of people necessary for your art goes up linearly, the codependency goes up exponentially.
Jazz dorks? Codependent.
Band dorks? Very codependent.
Drama kids? Whew.
Im kidding of course.
But also maybe a little bit not.
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I think the culture came from all the reasons you mentioned and the students felt like they had carte blanche to bully us because there were no repercussions from the professors. Like I mentioned, one professor seemed to encourage this type of discrimination saying that we don’t know how to read music and have no place in jazz. Originally Posted by Groyniad
After such a tough career with everything that I had to fight with off the bandstand, I don’t enjoy playing the guitar today as much as I did in high school or even when I was university. The singers were also treated like trash at my school while I was there so playing duo gigs with them was really fun on those days. We teamed up and formed our own circle being the outcasts of the department. There were definitely good times and memories within that circle musically which probably explains why the only jazz I listen to today are jazz singers (Cyrille Aimee and Veronica Swift are my favorite right now).
I’m not completely ruling out playing small gigs here in Spain, but for me it’s not worth the effort to find them as I enjoy tutoring my students who I help with their English a lot more than playing guitar at this point and there’s a lot more demand for English lessons in the small town I live in where I’m the only native English speaker.Last edited by JazzerEU; 09-15-2024 at 10:21 AM.
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Good on you for embracing the role of the underdog. You went out and proved a lot of people wrong. That’s one of the most beautiful things in life. That was indicative of my entire music career, being counted out and underestimated. One thing I do miss from my music career is being told that I can’t do something and go out and do it. There was a big jazz vocalist competition in my city every year and I was accompanying one of the singers. One of the other accompanists who was an established pianist on the scene came up to the singer and said she was going to lose because I was a guitarist. She ended up winning. When I got back to my car I celebrated like an American football player who scored a game winning touchdown against a team everybody favored to win. Granted I didn’t win anything, but I accompanied the singer who won, so I chalked that up as a personal victory. Originally Posted by Hep To The Jive
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Man, I thought my music journey was just like everyone else’s until a few years after I retired and realized how messed up the music scene I worked in was. Originally Posted by Bobby Timmons
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People throwing bricks through your windows? Death threats? For being a guitarist?
Sorry, I'm finding that a little hard to believe! But if it's true, even partly, then you have my sympathy.
I did a music composition major across 5 years (mainly C20th - serial/atonal etc) and was consiered the problem child as I refused to play piano, instead I brought a tape player to accompany my guitar
in order to play the compositions they were expecting on the piano. I copped eye rolls and groans, and was generally ostracized by the tutors and teacher's pets brown nosers, which was fine by me as I didn't in no way aspire to become what they were!
No regrets, as I lived on campus for most of those years, I had the time of my life. What I learned (musically, which is only a small part of what I learned) took many years to come through in my own music, but it's always there, and formed who I am as not just a musician, but also as a person.
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amazing how far away from the early vibe of the music we've come if an established jazz educator writes off an instrument because the players tend to be unable to read music!
I abandoned classical music with enthusiasm because of the reading - use number system not letter names for notes - never use charts on gigs (unless the alternative is worse) etc.
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Good on you for digging your own unique path. College tuition is so expensive that students should have a small say in how classes are structured. If anyone is reading this and is having a tough time in college, there is always a light at the end of the tunnel if you keep your head up. Originally Posted by princeplanet
People throwing bricks through your windows? Death threats? For being a guitarist?
Sorry, I'm finding that a little hard to believe! But if it's true, even partly, then you have my sympathy.
I did a music composition major across 5 years (mainly C20th - serial/atonal etc) and was consiered the problem child as I refused to play piano, instead I brought a tape player to accompany my guitar
in order to play the compositions they were expecting on the piano. I copped eye rolls and groans, and was generally ostracized by the tutors and teacher's pets brown nosers, which was fine by me as I didn't in no way aspire to become what they were!
No regrets, as I lived on campus for most of those years, I had the time of my life. What I learned (musically, which is only a small part of what I learned) took many years to come through in my own music, but it's always there, and formed who I am as not just a musician, but also as a person.
The death threats usually came from pianists I would “take” gigs from. If a singer who usually hired x pianist and then started being me for gigs, I’d usually get a phone call with the caller ID blocked saying I should leave town or face death. The police reports I filed went nowhere.
The police couldn’t find who threw the brick into the house I was living in, but it could’ve just been someone who supported an American politician who used that type of rhetoric. Thankfully home insurance covered the damages.
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I think my time at music school was definitely worth it. In hindsight though I think the course had its weaknesses, certainly from my perspective. For example, there were no courses on musicianship - skills such as sight-singing and dictation, those sorts of things were simply taken for granted - but come to think about it from what I recall of GCSE music and A-level music, it hardly if at all featured in those things either! And going back further, I had to teach myself how to read music since it wasn't a given thing for the guitar, of course. And if by being able to read music we mean the ability to audiate it, I'm still learning!
Anyway, getting back to music school, yeah so it was a bit intimidating that some of my fellow students had much more developed ears than I did, and the school should have addressed this deficiency because I'm sure I wasn't the only one, and what use is there is studying harmony and counterpoint when you have crappy ears? Other than that, it was a good course, it was good that you could take modules that spanned the whole history of western music or at least most of it, from medieval chansons right up to High Modernism. The composition modules were also very good. My time in general I like to think of the best of times and the worst of times. I failed my third year, not because I was slacking off and having fun, more like a combination of stress and depression coupled with loneliness, and half way through the second semester of the academic year, I basically burnt out and called it quits. But that was OK, I think at that time everyone was able to fail at least one year because you could still get a loan for a fourth year. So I came back for a fourth year and I still had friends there who had failed a previous year and I ended up in better accommodation and started smoking weed more regularly. Doing that and hanging out with my friends more often made me much more relaxed and enabled me to do the considerable creative work involved in writing enough music for my composition portfolio, which was my main project that I was unable to do the previous year. So the last year was definitely my favourite, and ironic that that was the year I actually managed to complete all the work I had to do given that it was also the time I spent getting most stoned haha! I don't recommend it though, since weed following that year definitely came back to bite me big-time, though in hindsight I should've just quit it then.
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big Veronica Swift fan myself
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I went to the community program at a College. Same teachers, but nothing like a degree program.
Some of the classes taught me very little, even with a big name player.
But, others made a huge difference. It raised my awareness of what was possible.
For example, the first time a fellow student heard me play a wrong chord and then told me not just the right chord, but he knew the wrong chord that I played -- by ear (he was a pianist), I realized I had some ear training to do.
As a result of the class and guests from the pro world, I was exposed to real musical geniuses. That's breathtaking.
There were many such instances about various aspects of playing.
My joke eventually was that I was a guitarist for 35 years before I found out what it meant to be a musician.Last edited by rpjazzguitar; 09-15-2024 at 04:56 PM.
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That certainly fits with my experience, and I'd add you need a certain (above-average) level of warm-bloodedness (except maybe for certain English music and performance practice ^^) Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
A lot of fun, great to be around, but just don't count on them as friends. I didn't see much evidence of bullying or jealousy among the crowd I came up with though, but this was in a very different musical discipline.
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There's music schools and music schools. In the UK one problem is that the defunding and slow erosion of music education in the state sector over the past ten years means that the elite schools are increasingly dominated by private school students (which has always been somewhat the case, but more so) while smaller departments like Kent and City have shut down.
Before this point there were problems with, for example, degree level composition students with no ability to read or write music, who could do interesting things on a DAW but had no idea how to interact with or write for real musicians.
So the goalposts moved on the skill sets of the young musicians coming into the faculty. That’s not a problem in itself, but it demonstrates a real cultural shift.
I think some music colleges are trying to get on top of it like Trinity Laban, which makes sense as it has traditionally been regarded as the poor relation to the other main London conservatoires - the Royal Colleges and the Guildhall - but seems very keen to build a reputation as a progressive and diverse music college. I like it personally, I did my MA there (non performance.)
otoh I’m told Trinity had hardly any classical students last year…. The times are changing.
In terms of my own experiences teaching in the (lower end) of the higher education music sector, I would say a lot those musicians were not really at the point were they could enter the profession by graduation. (There’s also the question of what exactly ‘entering the profession’ means anyway at this point….) Which is not the be all and end all of course, but it is a consideration.
Meanwhile those who went to specialist music and other private schools had access to these skills and had often been taught by jazz and classical musicians at the top of their game with extensive industry experience while still at school. Which doesn't mean they're all great, just that they have a much better idea of the lay of the land by the time they enter music school. This is of course generally true of higher education.
So on that basis I'd say - get into a top music college and have it together when you get in and focus hard, or don't bother. It's a lot of money.Last edited by Christian Miller; 09-15-2024 at 04:07 PM.
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Wow. Well, it is a lot of money, but you really think there's no point in going to a music college which isn't at the 'top'? I mean, I sort of agree with the rest of what you say here - it would have been nice to have had it together when I got in (to my sort of middling music college) and have been prepared to focus hard - but, such is life... Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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I’m kind of talking about jazz guitar here.. and by top, that might mean not studying in the UK. I’d try for a bursary place in or near New York. I know quite a few who’ve done that. If that’s your path. Originally Posted by James W
I also don’t mean if you can’t get into one of the fancy colleges give up on music. I mean - consider building up your skills and maybe try again. Or just not doing the college thing, even. Which I think is still easier here than in the US.
Also I know plenty who had a disappointing undergrad experience and levelled up going into postgrad.
The people you surround yourself with are the most important thing, and that’s not totally under anyone’s control. Jacob Colliers year at RAM for example haha. If you want to be a really good player you do kind of need to be around people who are better than you. Which is probably not the most fun you can have, but you will improve. (Or give up.)
Otoh if their goals aren’t the same as yours - could be excruciating. Imagine being a party animal surrounded by people who practice eight hours a day? Or vice versa?
I’m sort of looking at it from the perspective of ‘what would I do if I had my time again’ - which of course is not the same thing at all. Very few have that kind of clarity of purpose when young. And my ego was very fragile back then.
on balance I’m really glad I studied something non musical at degree level. I think at 19 I would not have been able to deal with somewhere like Trinity, much less RAM. Otoh I’m not sure I’d recommend my own path to anyone else.
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I’d add that in London at least it seems to work out that if you can play no one will really cares what college you went to. I’m always struck by how open and friendly it tends to be.
There are some cliques of people who all went to the Academy or whatever but on the whole the scene is big enough that people drift in and out having studied all over, or not at all, and as individuals most people just seem open to meeting and playing with new musicians. Increasingly everyone I meet seems to be very very good, esp the young players. It’s a strong scene.
I don’t get the impression that this is the case everywhere.
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