Should You Major in Music Performance?

Photo by Declan Sun on Unsplash

I seriously do not recommend majoring in music performance. And it's probably not for the reasons you're thinking.

Before you close this tab, hear me out. I have a bachelor's and a master's in music performance. I lived this experience for six years. I'm not here to talk you out of something I haven't done myself. This post isn't about money or job prospects or how many hours you'll spend in the practice room. It's about something that nobody told me before I went in, and something I wish I had understood better going into it.

1. The Advice I Got Before College

When I was preparing to audition for college as an undergrad, I took my clarinet to my repairman to get it in shape. I mentioned I was going to audition for music school and major in music performance.

I expected the usual response. That's so exciting! College is going to be great! What I got instead was something like: "Oh, that's nice, if you feel like you have to do that."

That caught me completely off guard. This was someone who was more plugged into the real music world than most of the people I talked to, and he was distinctly unenthusiastic. I filed it away in the back of my mind, assumed he was talking about the usual concerns, and went ahead with my plans.

It took six years to fully understand what he actually meant.

2. The Things Everyone Assumes You're Worried About

Let me quickly address the two things most people bring up when they talk about music as a career, because I don't think either of them is the real issue.

Making Money

Yes, landing a seat in a major orchestra like the New York Philharmonic or the Chicago Symphony is extremely difficult and genuinely competitive at a level that's hard to overstate. But making a living as a musician is a very different thing. Teaching private lessons, playing gigs around holidays, performing with small ensembles, building something online like I've done with QuickStart Clarinet, there are a lot of paths to making a decent living through music. Money is a real concern, but it's not the insurmountable obstacle people make it out to be.

The Practice Hours

Yes, you will spend a lot of time in a practice room. But if you're a process-oriented person who genuinely enjoys getting a little bit better every day, that's not actually a bad thing. I liked practicing. I was never afraid of the hours. And honestly, compared to some other majors, no papers and no calculus homework is a pretty good trade.

3. The Real Reason: Subjectivity and the Infinite Skill Ceiling

Here's what my repairman was actually getting at, I think.

Music is completely subjective. Play for one person and they think you sound incredible. Play for another and they hear a dozen things that need work. There is no objectively correct answer in music the way there is in engineering or accounting or medicine. You can work incredibly hard, put in hundreds of hours, and still walk away from a lesson or a rehearsal unsure whether you're heading in the right direction.

And closely connected to that is what I call the infinite skill ceiling. You never finish. There is no level of playing where you arrive and it's done. Even the most celebrated musicians in the world are still practicing, still working, still being evaluated and compared. There is always someone who plays differently, and depending who you ask, maybe better. You never cross a finish line.

In other fields, you can reach competence. You can know the material. In music performance, you are always striving toward something you can never fully reach, and the target moves every time someone new listens to you play.

4. The Constant Comparison

Layered on top of all that subjectivity is the reality of living and studying alongside other musicians who are all working on the same thing you are.

You hear someone else play and think they're doing certain things so much better than you. Then another day you hear them and feel like you're right there with them, maybe even ahead in some ways. But it's inconsistent, it shifts from day to day and from one area of playing to another, and because it's all subjective, what you think doesn't necessarily match what your teacher thinks or what an audition panel thinks.

You can try your hardest to be genuinely happy for other players when they sound great, and it's absolutely worth trying to be that person. But if you're honest with yourself, there's always this undercurrent of awareness that in order to get the jobs you want, you need to be better than them. And you don't always know if you are. And you can't always find out. It wears on you over time in ways that are hard to anticipate before you're in it.

5. The Emotional Whiplash

All of that builds into what I think is the real core of what my repairman was warning me about: the emotional whiplash.

One day you have a great performance. You feel like you know exactly what you're doing. Everything clicked. You played with real presence and connection and you know it. That feeling is extraordinary.

The next day a conductor points out a flaw. Or you squeak on a phrase you've played a hundred times. Or you get a piece of feedback from a teacher that completely reframes something you thought you understood. And you're right back down.

This isn't occasional. It's constant. It can happen within a single rehearsal, or even within a single phrase. High, low, high, low. Knowing what you're doing to wondering if you know anything at all. And because the subjectivity never goes away, there's no moment of certainty to hold onto. The highs are real and they're beautiful. But so are the lows.

A lot of people drop their music performance major in the first year because they come in expecting it to be endlessly fun and expressive and instead find this relentless emotional and psychological pressure that they weren't prepared for. No papers, sure. But the internal struggle more than makes up for it.

6. So Should You Do It?

After six years of living this, I finally understand what my repairman meant when he said "if you feel like you must."

Music performance as a major is absolutely worth doing if you need it. If you need those moments of connection and expression. If you need the experience of sharing something deeply human through sound and having it land with another person. If those highs are so meaningful to you that they justify riding out the lows and doing the ongoing mental work of processing the subjectivity and the comparison and the whiplash.

But you need to go in knowing that the challenge isn't the practice hours or the job market. The real challenge is psychological. It's learning to let go of the bad moments and live fully in the good ones, over and over again, indefinitely. If you can do that, and you feel like you must pursue this, then do it.

7. A Note on Music Education

Everything I've described above is pretty specific to music performance, where your career hinges on your ability to play the instrument at an elite level.

Music education is genuinely different, and I actually do think you should consider it if you love music and want to work with people. It's not easier by any means. Being responsible for teaching children music is its own enormous challenge. But it doesn't carry the same weight of your personal playing being the constant measure of your worth. It has its own stresses, its own rewards, and its own deep sense of purpose.

The world genuinely needs music educators. Music is part of what makes us human, and helping other people connect with it matters. If that path calls to you, I'd encourage you to pursue it.

But music performance? Only if you must.

I originally shared these thoughts in a video on my YouTube channel, and the conversation in the comments turned out to be really rich. A lot of musicians chimed in with their own experiences, and it became one of those discussions I kept coming back to. If you want to hear me talk through all of this and see what others had to say, the video is worth a watch.