Bachelor of Music in Performance
Townsend School of Music is committed to providing comprehensive music degrees that nurture competent, creative, and successful music performers. Townsend School of Music students enjoy numerous solo performance opportunities, main stage productions, ensemble concert tours, and chamber music experience in an artistic environment. With small class sizes and a dynamic performance faculty, Townsend School of Music will help you achieve your goal of becoming a musical artist. Toward that end, we offer a Bachelor of Music Performance degree in numerous areas of study, including: Vocal Studies, Keyboard Studies (piano, organ, and harpsichord), and Instrumental Studies (wind, brass, strings and percussion).
About the Degree
The Bachelor of Music in Performance Degree is uniquely designed to allow a student to develop highly specialized technical skills and knowledge for their instrument or voice. Excellence as performers is the School’s goal for all students. Those majoring in performance, however, are held to a higher standard of technical ability, artistry and difficulty than those pursuing the other degrees offered in music.
The student takes approximately 65 percent of their required credits in the major area and in the supportive courses in music. The most distinctive feature of this degree is the double credit hours given for applied lessons from the sophomore year. This credit is assigned to compensate the student for the double amount of practice time spent to intensely prepare for the weekly applied lesson. The major areas of applied study include voice, piano, organ, harpsichord, orchestral instruments, wind instruments, percussion instruments and guitar.
Individual performance skills are nurtured in weekly private lessons, weekly studio classes, monthly recitals, semester-end juried examinations, junior recitals and senior recitals. Students are required to participate in at least one ensemble per semester, and most students perform in more than one. Large and small ensemble experiences are available in each applied music area.
Other required courses specifically designed for this degree program include pedagogy of the instrument/voice and literature of the instrument/voice. Teaching in a discipline invariably leads to the synthesis of knowledge about the subject area as well as heightened clarity of communication of that knowledge.
Other required supportive courses in music for this degree consist of sequences in music theory, musicianship, counterpoint, music history and conducting. An additional 12 music elective credit hours must be chosen from the array of course offerings within Townsend School of Music. The General Education requirements are met by enrolling in 39 credits of the Common Core within the College of Liberal Arts.