Mannes College The New School for Music

For students at Mannes College in New York City, music is a part of life both in and out of the classroom. Students at this world-renowned classical music conservatory benefit from and contribute to the city’s rich musical and cultural life.

Mannes is alone among New York City’s major conservatories in being part of a liberal arts university—The New School—allowing students to focus on performance while being able to access insightful courses in all the liberal arts.

At Mannes, small classes and a small student body (fewer than 300 students and a 2:1 student-faculty ratio) ensure that each student receives personalized instruction and has close interaction with faculty and staff members, administrators, and peers. Undergraduates can earn a Bachelor of Music, Bachelor of Science, or an undergraduate diploma in orchestral instruments, piano, harpsichord, voice, classical guitar, orchestral conducting, choral conducting, composition, or theory. Mannes also offers Master of Music degrees and Professional Studies Diplomas. At Mannes, older students frequently act as mentors for their younger colleagues, for example in the Mannes Orchestra, which includes about half of Mannes’ college students.

For aspiring musicians, there is no substitute for the experience gained by performing. Mannes presents hundreds of performances by students, faculty members, and artists-in-residence each year in its two concert halls. In addition, Mannes offers unsurpassed opportunities for students to perform at major venues throughout New York City, including Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. In 2008, the New York Times praised the Mannes Orchestra for a “lustrous, driven performance” at Carnegie Hall and the Mannes Opera for a performance of Francis Poulenc’s “Dialogues of the Carmelites” at the Kaye Playhouse, which lived up to the program’s “stellar reputation for the quality of its productions and the excellence of its student singers.”

As part of the curriculum, performance courses are balanced with techniques of music courses to give students solid training in the language of music. Through ear training, dictation, keyboard skills, theory, and analysis courses, students deepen their understanding of the structures of music. In addition, students receive private lessons with one of the school’s 150 distinguished faculty members and study a curriculum that is tailored to meet their particular needs. The Mannes Opera program, led by Metropolitan Opera conductor Joseph Colaneri and featuring the vocal guidance of legendary opera singer Regina Resnik, is considered among the top in the country, producing full-staged professional operas every year. As Anne Midgette has written in the New York Times, “People in the opera would often ask: Where are all the good, healthy young voices? Here’s an answer: At Mannes College....”

When they are not practicing or attending classes, students have plenty of opportunities for relaxation and recreation in Mannes’ residential Upper West Side neighborhood. Students can dine on any sort of food imaginable, explore Central Park, walk to major museums and nearby theaters, and attend live performances at concert halls throughout the city, most of which are within minutes of Mannes.

Students at Mannes have access to everything aspiring musicians need. The Federal-style building Mannes calls home offers classrooms, practice rooms, a state-of-the-art computer lab, and the Scherman Music Library, which features a collection that includes 8,000 books, 30,000 scores, 9,000 recordings, 300 video recordings, many music-related periodicals, specialized databases, and electronic resources, as well as study carrels, computers, and a complete music and listening library. The New School also offers the facilities of the Fogelman Social Science and Humanities Library, located on the downtown campus, and, through a consortium known as the Research Library Association of South Manhattan, the Bobst Library at New York University and the consortium’s online catalog, Bobcat, are accessible on the Internet.

The pursuit of instrumental and vocal mastery is complemented by classes in literature, history, and liberal arts. Degree candidates have access to The New School’s broad liberal arts curriculum, and Mannes students share resources with The New School’s other divisions: The New School for General Studies, The New School for Social Research, Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy, Parsons The New School for Design, Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts, The New School for Drama, and The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music.

The performance faculty at Mannes includes active professionals from all areas of the music world—concert artists, chamber musicians, successful freelancers, established composers, and members of such leading organizations as the New York Philharmonic, Metropolitan Opera, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, New York City Opera, and Philadelphia Orchestra.

Students also have access to a network of thousands of successful alumni who are putting their training to work on stages around the world. Mannes’s distinguished alumni include Frederica von Stade, Richard Goode, Murray Perahia, JoAnn Falletta, and Kaori Sato. For more information about Mannes, students should visit http://www.newschool.edu/mannes.

Application Procedures

Deadline--freshmen and transfers: December 1. Notification date--freshmen and transfers: April 15. Required: essay, high school transcript, college transcript(s) for transfer students, letter of recommendation, interview, audition, TOEFL for international students for whom English is a second language. Recommended: minimum 2.0 high school GPA. Auditions held 1 time on campus.

Mannes College The New School for Music

Application Procedures

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