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Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN has a top rate undergraduate liberal arts program. Their Blair School of Music accomodates majoring, minoring and music as a second major. Although this is a conservatory type program, their harp professor, Marian Shaffer also encourages her students to pursue and prepare for their harp interests including symphonic music, harp ministries, harp therapy, masters programs
Hey Barbara. It’s a long story… I hope to get it fixed at some point.
It’s not the database, it’s something the webserver is doing on the way
there. One of these days when I have time I’ll track it down.Hi Carl!
Your concerns about majoring in music are valid. However, I would argue
that they apply to almost all college majors and that, unless you are
preparing for a career in a very specific technical area like
electrical engineering (for example), your major is more or less
irrelevant.My case is a good example. I have a percussion performance degree from
Rice University. Sometime before I graduated I became temporarily
insane and decided I wanted to be an English professor. I applied to
graduate school, was accepted, and spent two years getting a master’s
in English before I came to my senses. (You think the job market for
harpists is bad, you should try English professor.) My current career?
I’m a software engineer.I have always felt that the point of a university education was to a.
demonstrate that you have the capacity to do something hard in a timely
fashion, and b. teach you to put up with a lot of nonsense along the
way. The specific things you learn in most undergraduate college majors
— English, history, business, science, math — are for the most part
things you are going to either forget permanently, or forget and then
relearn properly in graduate or professional school or on the job.So my advice to your student would be to go ahead and major in harp.
Take the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work your tail off and
perform two recitals of serious music and be judged on it. Your choice
of “Music Performance” rather than “Managerial Studies” will be at
worst a minor inconvenience if you decide on a different career later,
but you will never, ever have the same opportunity to concentrate on
music as though nothing else mattered.I went to the Dusty Strings on friday and had a first hand opportunity comparing Ravenna and Allegro, and I must say I was pretty surprised at how much better the Allegro sounded.
I try to stay away from black wore it too much in orchestras so only when requested if I’m playing for something special and they request it.
I have it and it is fantastic! I have been using it with my students for the last few years, to help them choose pieces at their performance level. I admit that I am very “French-school” when it comes to teaching, and I love the way the pieces are graded from level 1 to 10 by degree of difficulty, technical requirements, etc. It is organized in three cycles: beginners from years 1 through 3, intermediate from 4 to 7, and advanced from 8 to 10- much like the Conservatory programs in Europe. I bought this book at one of the music stores in Paris when I was living there, and I consider it a must-have for all harp teachers out there!
Beatriz Martin-Ruiz
