Don't forget that to get into good school, they select only good students, for Juilliard for example, they chose among hundreds and hundreds of applicants. There is thorough selection process. Nobody happened to get into Juilliard. Therefore, great schools have 99.9% more chance of producing great pianists.

I do not understand why you or others do not see from this point of view.

Of course Ronald. But the question lies exactly where you don't want to check: Does Juliard have anything to do with the final output (the students coming out of Juliard), or is it just a result of the preselection process? Cause of Juliard has little to do with the quality of the students, only in preselecting the good ones, then... the school trully does not play an important part in this, right?

You are missing the point. The licensing process just to confirm your knowledge. The knowledge itself has been there. Are you saying a Harvard Medical student who does not take the State board exam is less smarter than the one who took the exam? Some people just do not want to get into the field. But does not mean that person has less knowledge.

It is a proven facts that Juilliard or other top conservatories hire only the best teacher, so the expectation of these great teachers are very high. They select the best students only.

You used the correct word, pre-selecting. It is the most important thing. If you preselect concert pianist material, you most likely will produce great pianists, for these people have proved that they have the talent, work ethics etc. Otherwise, Juilliard will not choose them. As I had said many many times, the worse Juilliard piano students must be better than most state school studets.

Best students + best teachers (cost a lot of money) = produce great products.

Other schools

So so studetns + so so teachers = may produce great products, but very unlikely.

oy

"You are talking only in the US term.... Even nail people need license in the US."

There were too many ladies coming home from those nail parlors with flesh-eating bacteria (especially from those nasty foot-baths); the State had to step in. You might catch a cold from piano keys, but...

Great point! There's a guy who licks his fingers before the octave glissandos at the end of the Waldstein. God forbid you have to play right after him......that's the kind of thing we really should be going after.

Yeah..you do not know what I have just scratched.....before I did my glissando.

Well, Mr. Steinway, I can't understand, from this post and several others, what your point of view is nor what kind of logic you are using to elucidate it.

Now you tell us - in bold and underlined - that "Nobody happened to get into Juilliard." How in the world can Juilliard turn out the great musicians you claim they do if "nobody happened to get into Juilliard?

Then you say "therefore" (therefore - meaning, consequently, as a result) "...great schools have 99.9% more chance of producing great pianists." 99.9%? So the fact that nobody happened to get into Juilliard is proof that great schools have 99.9% more chance of producing great pianists."

That figure of 99.9% sounds like a verifiable statistic; where does it come from?

Your logic is incomprehensible to me.

(He meant that nobody got in by accident.....they were all excellent in the first place.)

I mean, I don't agree with his point, but I'm happy to help clarify it.

I think pilloried is a bit unfair - I certainly didn't mean to bash the school. On the contrary, they have been very good to me. At the same time, comparing it with a conservatory is a joke. All that I did was say the truth:

1. The faculty is solid overall, and there is one fantastic teacher there

2. There is only one other student who has ever played a Beethoven sonata movement besides me.

3. The voice program is good, as are the winds, but we have a nearly non-existent music department aside from that. Let me put this in perspective for you - we don't even have a single school orchestra - a major university such as CCM has three, plus a couple of recreational ones at the actual University of Cincinnati!

4. I stated I could major in voice and performance despite never having training in either. This is also a fact - there are no auditions for admittance; merely placement.


You're free to draw your own conclusions from that; never did I say that it was a "bad" or "good school". In fact, I am learning more here than I did (piano wise, not academically) at CCM due to my current teacher. At CCM, sophomore year our lessons were a complete waste of time, and our teacher was routinely 1-3 hours late, sometimes due to him engaging in recreational activities and making us wait (hint for professors - if you're going to be late, don't show up in spandex while sweating your bottom off). If you left, you failed. At least at Xavier I'm actually getting the lessons I pay for. Plus, I get all the performance opportunities and more scholarship at the smaller school.

However, as much as I like the school, it would be unfair for me to exaggerate the facilities (which are in the process of being upgraded) or the talent supply of the students - which quite frankly is seriously lacking. The chair of the music department and the chair of the piano department are both wonderful, but the fact of the matter is that 99% of the talent goes to CCM just down the street.

Nevertheless, it just goes to illustrate my point - having a piano degree from anywhere other than a top school/conservatory is completely meaningless when taken as a judge of pianistic level and/or professionalism and should not be used as criteria in a competition. How can you possibly call someone a professional if they've never even played a concerto?

Percomputerpro3 - "How can you possibly call someone a professional if they've never even played a concerto?"
____________________________________________________

Some folks might take exception to this statement - but you do raise an interesting point !!

Well, that makes more sense. The statement was so ambiguously written, with every word emphasized in bold and underlined, that I had no idea what he was trying to say.

Thanks, Mark.

Regards,

It ain't as interesting as all that.

Lots of pros haven't played a concerto.
And conversely, lots of amateurs have. Even me.
"Concerto or no concerto" is no criterion at all.

When we have people suggesting criteria like this, it just shows how tough the subject is.

Interesting..

Can you name a professional who hasn't played a concerto?

What makes that particular sentence ambigous? How does bold font and underline change the meaning of the sentence? Will you understand a sentence differently if I use different color? Is the idiom "happened to" confusing to you?

Quite a few.

You haven't heard of them......it's friends of mine. And friends of yours who are professional musicians, there's a good chance that many of them haven't. The ones we've all heard of, yes, they've mostly all played concertos.

IMO your question shows how much the question has gotten diverted and diluted. We're not talking about Horowitz and Rubinstein and Ax and Kissin. We're talking about professionals or borderline professionals who might possibly try to enter amateur competitions.

Actually I probably shouldn't be working so hard on this because as I've said, just about any definition of "amateur" is OK by me, as long as it's clear and enforced. IMO the main issue, by far, is just the lower age limit.

It was an elliptical colloquialism.

I mean, I got it, but I could see how someone wouldn't have.

I don't see the need for sarcasm, Mark.

I read the sentence as "Nobody happened to get into Juilliard," as if the context were "Can you imagine? That year, among all those great applicants, nobody happened to get into Juilliard!" I read "Happened to" - in the past tense - in the sense of "managed to."

Had he written : "Nobody just happens to get into Juilliard," then there would have been no ambiguity in my mind.

BRUCE -- you made a mistake. That stuff wasn't by me.

The way you posted it somehow made it look like it was....but it wasn't.

(That's what I get for trying to help out......)

My apologies, Mark; I did make a mistake.

Serves me right for getting involved in this ridiculous discussion. I should have known better.

Regards,

No. But I can name several who don't.

One wonders when Martin Katz's last concerto performance was, and yet he's one of the top professionals in the field.