Recital credits: required but valuable

By Jonathan McFadden

Katie Towson is taking 21 credit hours, 12 classes—many of them worth only one credit hour—and living off campus this semester.

When she’s not learning how to play new instruments in class, she’s applying her skills in the music department’s practice rooms.

While not at home working on school assignments, she’s rushing back to campus in order to catch the latest recital in Barnes Recital Hall.

As a junior music education major, Towson is required to obtain 70 recital credits in order to graduate.

First year graduate student Jared Jones spends many hours in the practice rooms, tuning his piano skills and rehearsing new music. Jones is working toward his Masters of Music, which requires between 32 and 34 credit hours. Photo by Stephanie Eaton • eatons@thejohnsonian.comShe isn’t the only one.

Students seeking a B.A. in music have to obtain 60 credits, while students majoring in music performance have to obtain 80.

Recital credits are a necessary component for music majors to complete their graduation requirements.

Dr. Donald Rogers, the department chair for Winthrop’s music department, said recital credits help music students expand their knowledge of their own performances. It also exposes them to a wide range of music and instruments outside of their own concentration.

“Being a music major doesn’t mean just studying voice if you’re a voice major, it means learning about string quartets or learning about trumpets,” Rogers said.

While the amount of recital credits may seem demanding, Rogers said if students attend 10 recitals a semester, they will be in good shape for meeting all of their requirements. If they procrastinate and fail to get all their requirements, they don’t graduate.

Though students with special circumstances, such as having a family, may have an excuse for missing recitals, they, too, are not exempt from delayed graduation if they fail to attend all the recitals they need to.

In his 35 years at Winthrop, Rogers said recital credits have always been around. He said he can’t recall a time when a student failed to graduate due to strictly being behind on their recital credits.

Though students in recitals are no longer allowed to get credit for their own performances, Rogers said up to 120 programs are offered per academic year for students to attend. Instead, students receive academic credit for their performance in group recitals, such as ensembles and choirs.

One upside to getting recital credit is simultaneously getting cultural event credit.

Since most of the recitals are cultural events, Towson said she finished obtaining her cultural event credit the second semester of her freshman year.

Towson said watching other students perform in recitals helps improve her own skills. It also helps her GPA when she is assigned to write critiques of the recitals she watches.

For Towson’s boyfriend, junior music education major Joshua Billingsley, it helps expose him to literature he said he wouldn’t seek out on his own.

Billingsley, a trumpet player who has performed in jazz ensembles and brass quartet recitals, said he mostly listens to jazz and probably wouldn’t normally listen to an excerpt from an opera. The recitals, though, provide an exception.

“It’s a good way to find new music and get exposed to new things,” Billingsley said.

Jarvis Miller, senior music performance major who completed a good portion of his recital credit toward the end of his sophomore year, can relate.

Comparing recitals to the liberal arts education offered at Winthrop, Miller said he owes his exposure to a wide range of music and ideas to attending many recitals.

Miller, who changed his major from music education to music performance, had 69 credits when he switched majors. Having attended many recitals during his first two years in college, Miller said obtaining the credit wasn’t too difficult, but students have to be smart about scheduling their attendance.

“Recital credits are almost like cultural events on steroids; it’s really crazy,” Miller said.

Both Billingsley and Towson agree that being a music major is very demanding.
   
“It pretty much consumes your whole life,” Billingsley said. “Usually it’s just all I think about; when I wake up, it’s music.”

Still, with such a demanding schedule and high expectations, Towson said it forced her to learn how to manage her time almost as soon as she came to Winthrop.
 
“It kind of forces you to mature academically,” Towson said.

With such dedicated drive in their field, Towson and Billingsley don’t experience too much of a social life.

Towson said students similar to her have to forfeit many social activities, while Billingsley said his training at Winthrop has led him to view social time as wasted practice time.

Dr. Rogers said music, as with many other subjects in the arts, requires discipline and a devotion to building one’s skills.

Rogers said that while music majors have part-time jobs and families similar to other students, they’re usually too busy to participate in other clubs and organizations, such as student government.

A degree in music education requires 138 hours, opposed to the 124 hours required by many other majors at Winthrop.