Synthesis of Liberal Arts and a Professional Music Degree

I am a student in the Petrie School of Music at Converse College. Petrie School of Music, as a professional school of music, provides education toward a professional degree in music. Converse is a liberal arts college. As Martin Luther’s Small Catechism would phrase it, what does this mean?

According to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, the liberal arts currently “comprise studying literature, languages, philosophy, history, mathematics, and science.” The liberal arts originally denoted the education a free man should obtain as opposed to that of a slave; in the middle ages the liberal arts comprised the trivium - grammar, rhetoric, and logic - and the quadrivium - geometry, arithmetic, music and astronomy. In a liberal arts college, the objective is to impart to the student a broad basis of knowledge in a variety of fields and to discipline the student’s “rational thought and intellectual capabilities” such that the student has the intellectual flexibility to function in and adapt to our changing, complex world. In Converse College’s Opening Convocation, we students were urged repeatedly to explore and continually develop ourselves in various areas of study - to become “well-rounded” Converse women, schooled in the liberal-arts ideals of intellectual excellence and flexibility.

Also according to Wikipedia, a “first professional degree […] prepares the holder for a particular profession by emphasizing competency skills along with theory and analysis.” The student’s objective, in a professional degree, not unlike that of an 18th-century apprenticeship, is to become excellent and skillful in his or her chosen field. For example, as a pursuant of a professional degree in music, I am refining my skills in performance, in how my brain processes music, and acquiring background information about music, its history, and its musicians and composers.

Thus, as a professional degree student, most of my coursework, about 70 % according to the Petrie School of Music web page, is within my chosen field of music, but as a student in a liberal arts college, a significant portion of my coursework is in other subjects. Yes, I need musical skills, but I also need to communicate through the written and spoken word, both in my native language and in other languages, and to keep myself physically fit; accordingly, Converse College requires Bachelor of Music-Performance Majors to learn to do these things. In addition, many of the elective general education courses I can take not only provide a gymnasium for my mind but actually provide me with applicable information. Here are a few examples:
• Botany. Anyone who has ever help to take care of a lawn will appreciate the botanical reasons that dandelions are so difficult to eradicate, a few of which are that their taproots root them firmly in the ground and that their wind-blown seeds in their hundreds and thousands spread rapidly.
• Philosophy. In Cultural Collisions, one of the courses I am currently taking, we have discussed the concept of the Ethnographer’s Dilemma, which is that if you assume too much difference between your culture and the other culture, you will be unable understand the other culture at all, but if you assume too much similarity, you will overlook the differences, seeing just surface differences. I can apply this concept on a personal level when I meet people and get to know them.
• Religion. When I study chorales and hymns in music history, the fact that Martin Luther thought all of the congregation, not just a trained choir, should make music to worship the Lord and to help remember facts about God, and his reference to Biblical scripture to back this up, helps me to understand the development of hymn and chorale forms, which were often repetitive and easy to remember.

So the information and training I acquire in the liberal arts is applicable both in my general life as a human and in my activities and studies as a musician.

(By the way, as one might have guessed from the multiple references to Martin Luther, yes, I am Lutheran.)