One of the great stresses of being a high school musician is balancing your music with schoolwork and keeping your grades up. Many argue that grades are not important for musicians, while others insist on being a straight-A AP student. But who’s right?!
I believe the optimal path lies somewhere in between these two extreme ideas.
Long-term, if you plan on majoring in music, you’ll never use a lot of the content you learn in your high school classes. Unless you have a creative idea beyond my imagination, Chemistry and Calculus aren’t going to be very useful to you. However, the medium through which most people get their higher musical training is college, and the colleges do care.
If you end up going to a top-shelf conservatory, academics won’t be as big of a priority in your acceptance and scholarship. However, many of the nation’s best music schools are at universities – some of them very academically prestigious universities such as Rice and Northwestern. And every year many of the best musicians in the nation are turned from from schools like Rice and Northwestern because their grades are not on par with the university’s standards. This is unfortunate, but if you stay on top of your grades, that guy who neglected his grades in high school may lose his spot to you!
Furthermore, even if you’re going to a school that doesn’t have super rigorous academic requirements (like I am at ASU), having high grades is one of the best (and oftentimes easiest) ways to earn scholarship money and pay for school. This varies widely depending on the school, but for example, ASU offers scholarships worth around half of tuition for out-of-state students if you have a GPA over 3.7 (there are other requirements as well but nothing huge). Again, many students end up not being able to attend the schools they liked because their grades didn’t earn them enough scholarship money to make it possible. It’s to your advantage to not be one of those kids.
That being said, there are also many people who place too much emphasis on grades.
As a high school freshman, one of my biggest goals was to graduate as valedictorian. But as I progressed through high school, I realized that to perform music at the level I wanted to and have straight A’s in a ton of AP classes was going to be almost impossible, and incredibly stressful. There’s only so many hours in a day to get things done. And while you want to keep your GPA as close to straight A’s as you can for scholarship purposes, a B here and there is not going to have any effect on what scholarship most schools give you, and AP classes have no bearing on what scholarship the universities give you.
On a tangent, I’d also like to note that while your AP credits may count towards the number of college credits you need for graduation, all universities will have a minimum credit hour limit to retain scholarships, in which AP credits do not count. So for example, if you took AP Music Theory in high school, you will not need to take Basic Music Theory in college – but you will probably have to take another course of your choice (think of it as an elective) as a substitute to meet the credit requirements for your scholarship.
In conclusion, I would say that it is in fact important to have good grades to maximize your options in terms of schools you can get accepted to and scholarships you can earn, but once you get to the 3.7/3.8 GPA range you have reached a point of diminishing returns. Don’t stress too much about taking a ton of AP classes and getting straight “A’s” every semester, but certainly do the best you reasonably can to keep your options open!
A# Major 