Hello

[kelddath]

Hello everyone,

Just joined livejournal today and the first thing I looked for was a group that appreciates classical music (as a generalization for the baroque through the late romantic period).

I have been playing piano on and off for about 16 years and started taking lessons my freshmen year at college.  I'm now reaching the end of my college

Comments

[dazedpuckbunny]

Good luck with your recital and welcome to the group! :) Why do you feel so pointless with your hard work? :( I'm sure you're just fine. I'm definately a Beethoven girl so yay for Sonatas! Chin up and knock em dead on Halloween.

[cassandralz]

Welcome!

I've been playing the piano for 24 years, have a degree and everything, but work in a completely 100% unrelated field all day almost every day. And I don't think the work or the degree is pointless. :-) Music is a forever thing, regardless of what you do with yourself when you join the working world.

Good luck with your recital this weekend. I'm sure it will be wonderful!

[por_que_no]

Are you looking to continue (after you graduate) as a piano performance major, or are you interested in something like musicology, arts administration, music theory, etc? With your communications background I could see you going into arts administration (like PR for an artist or record label, running a teaching studio etc) or music criticism/journalism.

You've got some nice repertoire there for your senior recital--just curious though, what happened to the last movement of the Beethoven? :o

[kelddath]

Ah, thank you all for commenting! I suppose I really do want to go into piano performance... I just have lots of trouble putting all of my being into the music sometimes. It's odd, but often all it takes to get me back into it is having a few friends to provide support. I don't have parents or relatives to speak of, so that makes it tough

[kelddath]

Oh, on a side note, I'm having the recital recorded so I'll toss it up on Youtube next week ^.^

[por_que_no]

eeeek! A month and a half is a ridiculously short amount of time for a recital--congrats on being able to prepare anything that quickly! I had 3 months to do my senior recital and it was still really harried and not adequately prepared.

If you want a grad degree in performance, though, you'll need to make some leaps and bounds in repertory choices...I'd expect that recital rep out of a high school senior auditioning at a pretty good school (Michigan, for example, where I went as a theory major but was friends with all the pianists and in a studio). Granted you only had a month and a half to prepare this, but if that's the type of stuff you're playing all the time, you might want to check out some more advanced stuff as well. Good luck!

[_appassionata_]

In my experience, people *rarely* have a career or "profession" in the subject of their undergraduate degree. I say blow yourself away with that BA in music, and start serious thinking about whether you want to continue pursuing that for graduate work or not. Most employers don't care what your undergraduate degree is in, they just care that you've got one. So have fun with your BA, and don't worry about whether you're gonna "make it big" when you graduate or not!

Re. continuing in music education...just let me warn you: if you aren't ready to throw yourself into a graduate music program 110%, don't do it. It's ok. You can still continue learning music and developing your skills; music is a life-long pursuit. But something about graduate school finds the crack in your armor and sucks the life out. (speaking from experience, YMMV).

Finally, you might want to start considering why you learn music. I realized in graduate school that I was only learning pieces for a grade or a paycheck. Neither of those are very good reasons

[_appassionata_]

Just realized how contradictory I sound about learning pieces for a grade or not. I mean, a grade should not be the *only* reason you are studying music, but just because you are getting a grade for a piece doesn't mean you are "doing it wrong." Make sense?