Doc wrote:I was a music performance major years ago. What I learned and experienced helped me greatly, but the application of it all, at least in a real world sense, happened on the job.
Or with one's private teacher.
I would expect skills on the primary instrument to be the subject of one's lessons, not the subject of the education. Both may happen at the same time, but they are different. Anyone might attend a college for an education and study with a pro at the same time to learn performance skills. They might even study wtih a pro outside that university.
For every working activity, both education and training have roles in preparing the worker. For the trades, the balance may strongly favor the training, and for the so-called learned professions, it may favor education (or not). That's why the trades used to propagate themselves using apprenticeship rather than college, with the idea that sufficient education happened in primary and secondary school.
A conservatory is a training institution for music, presumably reserved for those who are destined to be performers. They provide a more specialized education to the training, perhaps, but people who don't have the potential to make it as performers should have trouble getting into a conservatory in the first place. Arnold Jacobs, an early student at Curtis, never expressed his time there as a "college education", at least not in what I've read. But it was training at the highest level, and it was more of what somebody like him needed. I would expect a conservatory to be rather demanding of the students, including showing up with the appropriate equipment for their presumed training program, just as an apprentice carpenter is required to show up with good tools.
Of course, Jacobs, being Jacobs, supplemented that training with considerable education on his own. Most people who desire education are able, somehow or other, to obtain it.
But what tools would a physicist or lawyer show up with? They are expected to build an extensive library of theoretical thinking techniques, which they will apply to problems during training and practice. The lawyer will spend his undergraduate days learning language skills, history, government, and other liberal arts--there is no undergraduate law degree of which I'm aware. Then, the budding lawyer will attend law school for more specialized training, but the
entrance requirement for law school is a good education, well-achieved. Another example: a fresh engineering graduate is still expected to gain four years of experience before he or she can become licensed to practice without supervision. Those four years are there to provide the training to supplement the education in the sciences and in the liberal arts that engineers should have.
Is a performing musician a better person for having a good education? Of course. Are they more likely to win an audition, compared to, say, spending that four years studying with a top performing pro? Probably not. Nobody asks them for an essay or a speech during the audition.
It is probably not reasonable to expect someone entering a college education to walk in with the sorts of tools one might need for advanced training.
Rick "recognizing with some dismay that many non-professional jobs now require college training--a true oxymoron" Denney
