What is the best university or private college in the Southeast for music?
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 at
2:16 am
I wish to go into a performing arts career with Cirque du Soleil. I was just wondering what would be a great school to go to after I graduate high school. I have already looked into Full Sail University in Winter Park, Florida, but I don’t know if that school would be alright for performing arts in music. I need the absolute best. Expense does not matter.
Tagged with: cirque du • full sail university • music • winter park florida
Filed under: US Universities
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I auditioned to be a musician for Cirque du Soleil (no joke, I did it just a few months ago – it was definitely not your typical audition, it was really fun). If you want to be a part of the band, then you need to be amazing at improvising all types of music – from latin jazz to classical to pretty much anything. Make sure you have a good ear and can just improvise over any background music. To be honest you need to keep an open mind to be a musician (you can’t just focus on Cirque, b/c even if you sound great, you need the personality they are looking for, and it is VERY competitive and of coarse very limited openings, depending on your instrument..also a lot of their musicians are scouted, rather then having won an audition). I think it’ll be better to try to get gigs around town to get used to improvising and playing with random groups of instruments and musicians (and perform while standing up). (It’ll also be good practice to play with headphones and microphones- since that is what they deal with)
Florida State University is the only school that pops into my head when I think about Southeastern USA music schools. (they are mostly in the north east, and some in CA or TX.)
To be honest with you, you should go to a school that has a high reputation for music performance, and I don’t think there are many in the south east. Closest may be UNT in Denton, Texas. Most of the good schools are farther north like New England Conservatory in Boston, Indiana University in Bloomington, Eastman, Oberlin, North Western…you should apply to over all good music schools that have reputation, because reputation does carry a long way in the music industry. Graduating IU next year here from Jacobs School…and it is one of the best.
Look into: Berklee College of Music in Boston, The New England Conservatory of Music, The New School (they have two music programs, a Jazz school and the Mannes School of Music) in New York City and NYU.
Here are reviews from Music majors in the best schools of the country: http://www.unigo.com/explorer/reviews/reviewdirectory.aspx?major=Music
See if you could do an internship with Cirque de Soleil and apply credits toward your college course of study! Here’s a link to their job posts: http://www.cirquedusoleil.com/en/jobs/casting/home.aspx
Happy searching!