In this article, explore the benefits of a Bachelor of Arts degree for a broader approach to your career goals.
The conventional wisdom has always been this: if you want to become an opera singer, you should attend a university where you can earn a Bachelor of Music degree in voice performance, preferably in a conservatory environment. The current wisdom begs to differ. As the applicant pool gets larger and the number of performance opportunities for opera singers continues to shrink, many young singers are entering life after the university wishing they had a wider base of study and experience, as well as marketable skills to beef up their resume so that they have more job options while waiting for their big break to come.
For many years, the Bachelor of Arts degree was considered a soft option for students who could not get into a Bachelor of Music degree program. But the reality is that B.A. degrees are becoming increasingly popular for singers, cropping up in major universities across the country as the demand for this versatile degree grows ever larger. High school voice students, and their parents, are starting to see the benefits of earning the type of degree where a student can immediately enter a Master of Music program for Voice Performance as their natural next step toward a classical singing career—or they can enter the job market with skills that will make them appealing to a wide variety of employers, within and without the arts community.
Over the past few weeks, I had conversations with several professional singers who earned Bachelor of Arts degrees to ask how their careers were affected by earning the B.A. versus the traditional B.M. While the feedback I share specifically in this article is primarily from one recent graduate and one more established music professional, their comments were echoed by those of all the singers I interviewed.
Flexibility was one of the words that came up often in these conversations about the B.A. Kevin Arnold graduated with his Bachelor of Arts in Performing Arts with a concentration in Music from Clemson University in South Carolina two years ago. Not long after his graduation, he was offered both a cruise ship performance contract and admission into a M.M. program in Vocal Performance.
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He said of his B.A., “One of the biggest things for me was that I wasn’t forced into one or the other [classical music or musical theatre].” Many of the traditional B.M. programs for singers focus exclusively on classical singing, with some going as far as prohibiting their students from participating in musical theatre productions, even though the market for performers these days requires even classical singers to have the ability to sing nonclassical repertoire for concerts and other professional work.
Arnold’s B.A. program allowed him the flexibility to perform in classical concerts and operas as well as musicals so that he built up a body of work that made his résumé more appealing to future casting directors and producers once he left school. His path to a career in classical singing, he said, “was open, but it wasn’t the only choice that I had. I was more than prepared to start my grad track.”
But Arnold chose not to pursue his graduate work at that time because he was already booking work as a professional singer without the graduate degree. Since moving to New York City, Arnold has performed professional solo recitals, an Equity cabaret show in Manhattan, regional shows in other parts of the country and, recently, a production of Sunday in the Park with George at Axelrod Performing Arts Center in New Jersey with acclaimed director Eamon Foley. Arnold says that “one of the great things about [the B.A.] was I had a lot of flexibility with it…I didn’t have as many demands as a typical B.M., so I was able to go out and do professional contracts while I was studying, [and] that helped a lot when I was moving into ‘the real world.’”
Another of the many benefits of the B.A. that came up most often as I spoke with singing professionals was the ability to double major. Dr. Lisa Neher is a professional mezzo-soprano, composer, and educator and is currently an adjunct voice faculty member at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon. About the ability to double major, she said, “I was interested in many things in high school. I wanted to have the space to explore several areas of study before deciding to potentially double major. The conservatories I visited as a prospective student did not have room for that exploration. Many did not allow double majors.”
Neher went on to double major at Lewis & Clark, earning a B.A. in Music with an emphasis in composition and voice and a B.A. in Theatre with an emphasis in performance. After going on to earn an M.M. in Composition and a D.M.A. in Voice Performance and Pedagogy, she now spends her work life combining her musical interests, with a third of her professional life spent composing and the other two thirds spent teaching and singing both musical theatre and classical music. Without a B.A. that allowed her to explore, Neher would never have found classical composing, which now occupies a significant portion of her career.
The importance of how to market oneself as a singer and the way a B.A. helped these professionals learn to do that was another frequent topic in these interviews. Kevin Arnold mentioned, “My B.A. did a great job of preparing me in that aspect…how to network, how to reach out…how to create a resume, a cover letter, a website… That was a big help.”
Lisa Neher said, “I’m particularly grateful for the writing and critical thinking skills that I honed in my B.A. I built skills to make arguments, defend a position, research, document, and cite my work. I have applied these skills in representing my artistic work and what I do verbally in networking conversations. I regularly write grants, marketing copy for social media, press releases, my website, and more, which support my performing career and help build audiences. I deliver spoken program notes during concerts and talk to audience members, donors, and fellow artists during musical events.
“When I started my [M.M.], I watched fellow students who had come from a conservatory background struggle with these things. They had not received the same training I had in forming their thoughts [and] were not as comfortable talking about their work to audiences or thinking creatively about how they could frame a project they wanted to pursue in a way that would convince a grant review panel to give them funding.”
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Something young singers are usually considering as they enter their undergraduate experience is what their next four years will look like. Who will they meet? What will be the memories they make? Community is important, whether in a school experience or a professional one.
Arnold says, “Because there was openness to the [B.A.] degree, and I was able to take classes outside of the music degree, I was able to meet different kinds of students. And I think that helped me a lot because college isn’t just about growing as an artist, it’s about growing as a person. You’re finding out who you are. And the more you are around all sorts of different types of people from different backgrounds and cultures and ethnicities, through them you learn who you are.” Neher says, “Many of my closest friends were political science or history majors. I got to learn a lot by hearing them talk about their courses or by going with them to guest speakers that I would not have sought out if I was sequestered in a music conservatory.”
The consensus among those who earned a B.A. versus a B.M. is that the only drawback to the path they chose is the stigma surrounding it, although even that is beginning to change. Instead, it is time for the music community to turn its focus to the inherent privilege that is sometimes what makes it possible for students to earn acceptance into a B.M. Often, one of the reasons students gain acceptance into a B.M program, is their obvious body of knowledge and experience because of their access to private voice and piano lessons. They have had parents and choir teachers in well funded school districts who were able to invest time and finances into their musical education for years before they auditioned for college.
There are, however, students with equal talent who have never had the opportunity to receive private lessons and, therefore, their auditions reflect their lack of experience with music theory, piano, or foreign languages, and so they might be overlooked for acceptance into B.M. programs. Privilege, however, is not a predictor of success, just like acceptance into a B.A. or B.M. degree is not. Students with talent and a strong work ethic in a B.A. program can and will easily catapult themselves ahead of students in a B.M. program if those B.M. students possess less drive, work ethic, or talent. As Lisa Neher says, “We have to pay attention to the artistry that folks are bringing and not be so focused on impressive names on résumés.”
A Bachelor of Arts degree can be well equipped to offer singers the kind of education they are seeking to help them reach their goals. This means singers can widen their search to a greater variety of programs as they consider where they will spend their undergraduate years of study. After all, B.A. or B.M., what really matters is what kind of training and opportunities you will receive in your four years of undergraduate study.
As Kevin Arnold puts it, “If you’re going into a room to audition for people, whether it’s for grad school or for a professional company, they don’t care if you got a B.M. or a B.A. or a B.F.A or a degree in economics. The only thing they want to see are what roles have you done, and that’s even secondary to what you do in the room with them, how you perform. That’s all that matters.”
