Steel band concert
(Mine’s the blonde next to the giant right in the middle).
We need to talk.
Any time. And if CCM is under consideration when college season happens, let me know and I’ll tell her to try to be assigned to “shadow”. But, holy cow, hope Juilliard comes calling first.
He doesn't want to go the conservatory route. Where he went for middle school becomes a conservatory prep HS, so he made the decision then (as well as shifting to the Juilliard program).
That said, he's looking at colleges that have relationships with conservatories so he can keep his feet wet at a high level while studying whatever he ends up studying.
It's so, so cool your daughter is in percussion. There are so few women in it- they need lots more.
How did she get started? What are her plans for it afterwards?
CCM is really part of the University of Cincinnati. If I understand it correctly, the conservatory merged with the university a ways back but kept the name. (But the UC bands are a whole separate entity. Some, but not many, of the music majors double-dip.)
My dad is a retired 30+ year veteran junior high band director, their other grandpa played guitar in bar bands for 30ish years, and I play trumpet and piano, so my kids were doomed from day 1 (son is a senior music Ed major at Northern Ky University and a sax player.)
Daughter took piano lessons from 1st grade through 8th grade. In 7th grade, in probably the last thing she agreed with me for 6 years, I convinced her she would have more fun in band than chorus. She was apprehensive about starting a wind instrument basically a year behind since band starts in 6th grade most places here. I told her, look, you’ve been playing piano for years. You can walk in there blindfolded and start on mallets, it’s like 8 less fingers. And wa-la, a budding percussionist was born. Added bonus was her high school has a fantastic percussion teacher. They won National WGI championship in their class her sophomore or junior year, and marching band and leading the “pit” transformed her from a quiet, anxious little mouse into a rockstar (albeit one that can play literally every percussion instrument except an actual drum set. Yet.. lol)
She also did a year with the Cincinnati Youth Symphony Orchestra that convinced her that was what she wanted to do in college.
Now, she does stuff with 4 mallet technique that my eyes can’t even track in between bouts of banging on flower pots or some other “found” percussion instruments for the ensemble pieces.
She is double majoring in performance and music Ed, so she could go into teaching, but she has the chops and desire to do grad school and make a living performing I think. She’s a practice fanatic, while her brother is the king of “good enough” most days, lol, He’s more of a jazz/rock band player type, and is really good, but he likes to jump between alto, tenor and then I’ll hear trumpet for more days than sax, which is allegedly his “main”. He’ll make a great band director being able to start kids on everything that way, but he likely won’t be sitting in with the Cincinnati Pops.