BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Georgina Palmer is a composition student. She’s studying at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, but before she got there, she had no idea what it would be like. She also didn’t know anybody: she entered the university later than her fellow students, and she’d just made the move from New Zealand.
Georgina’s experience has been a great success: now in her third year, she has multiple composition awards and residencies under her belt. Now, she wants to tell other artists what it’s like to get started in your music degree in Australia. And who better to ask than someone who has just been through the experience?
University Music Studies: Ask Us Anything is a free online event initiated by Georgina and funded by the university’s IgniteLAB grant. Georgina designed the event for years 10-12 students who are thinking about entering a music degree (but have a whole bunch of questions about how it will actually work).
Teaming up with a panel featuring 11 other current and former Melbourne Conservatorium of Music students, Georgina will discuss everything from the structure and expectations of a music degree right through to networking and the social environment students will enter.
We settled in for a chat with Georgina to find out what she wants all prospective music students to know (and what she wished she’d known before she started out, too).
Georgina, you’ve come up with a fascinating idea for a Zoom meeting — and it’s free! Tell us all about it.
My project is University Music Studies: Ask Us Anything, and it’s an event that will be held via Zoom for prospective university students in Years 10-12 who are considering studying music at a tertiary level.
In the event, I — along with 11 other current and former University of Melbourne music students from various year levels and degree majors — will be sharing information with the prospective students that you can’t really get from a university handbook: telling them about what to expect from your classes, how to manage classes and your own rehearsal time, involving yourself in co-curricular or extracurricular music activities while at university, and also giving the prospective students a platform where they can comfortably ask us any questions they have about music university life.
The project idea came from, very simply, the fact that I think any prospective university student – regardless of what degree they plan to do – can benefit enormously from talking to students about their experiences with studying a particular degree in a particular place.
It’s really hard to know what university is going to be like until you go, but interacting with people actually going through it is an excellent way to feel a bit less nervous and uncertain about it.
So how did you go about making this happen?
I had a few Zoom meetings with Susan Eldridge, who is in charge of the IgniteLab Grants Programme — which is generously funding this project — to discuss how to reach out to my target audience and how to approach the running of the event. Her suggestion of hosting the event on Zoom was definitely the right way to go, because that makes the event much more accessible to interstate or international prospective students. As a New Zealander myself, having this accessibility is especially important!
We also decided to share information about the event through music organisations as opposed to directly contacting schools about it, which would involve so many emails: youth orchestras, youth choirs, composition groups, and so on – the places where young people considering studying music are more likely to be.
So far, the feedback about the event from the promoters has been really positive!
Congratulations on getting things off the ground! Let’s talk about this meeting and how it’ll help raise some interesting topics that aren’t often discussed. What are some of the biggest challenges you believe students face when they first enter their music degree?
I feel like, compared to a lot of other more ‘mainstream’ degree choices, there’s just more uncertainty about what studying music at a tertiary level involves. This also varies greatly depending on which major you are taking on – for example, as a composition student myself, my coursework quite rarely involves me actually needing to play an instrument for an assessment.
The main thing we plan to discuss with the event attendees is how a music degree is structured, which is something that is similar across any music degree-major. There’s not as much sitting in lecture halls, studying with flashcards, or three-hour exams as there are with other degrees. Conversely, there’s much more ‘source opportunities for yourself’ scenarios and late-night rehearsals in a music degree.
Getting a sense of how you’d spend your time while doing a music degree is really important for any prospective music student, but it’s something that isn’t discussed much in a formal university-run orientation event. Essentially, the core aim of University Music Studies: Ask Us Anything is to fill in those gaps in a prospective music student’s knowledge about what their future music degree will likely involve.
How did you overcome difficulties when you were starting out, especially as you had to figure them out along the way — without the heads up this meeting is designed to give?
Quite simply, asking a lot of people a lot of questions! Whenever I had or have a question about something university-related, I ask it as soon as I can, whether it’s over an email or at the end of a class.
I actually only started studying at the University of Melbourne in 2023, after doing a year of study in New Zealand beforehand. So getting the transfer of my previous study credit sorted out, as well as settling into life at a new university and in a new country, was a lot to handle at once. I’m really enjoying the challenging content of the study at the University of Melbourne, and I feel more settled and integrated into my new Melbourne life as I approach another year of studying there.
I’m really grateful to my lecturers, accommodation managers, and friends that helped answer my questions when I was starting out somewhere new. I sent them all so many emails and messages when I was getting ready to move to Australia from New Zealand in the summer of 2022/3, but I’ve come to learn that many people at university are simply wanting to see students succeed, and therefore are more than happy to help if you have any questions about anything. At university, there is no such thing as a dumb question, honestly!
After they get settled in, how would you describe the unique demands that are then placed on music students who must engage in an extraordinary amount of work outside the classroom — from personal practice to group rehearsals and analysing or composing scores?
Because music is fundamentally an art form, allowing time for creativity is something that you don’t encounter in a lot of other degrees. For me, especially as a composition student, we need to compose at least five new pieces each semester, so a lot of our study time is spent experimenting with musical motifs on an instrument, on paper, or on musical-notation software. Often, several hours of this leads to little visible results, so there’s a lot of the ‘trust the process’ mentality required, which is something you’d also probably find to a lesser extent in other degrees where the results of study are sometimes more tangible straight away.
It’s not easy for any music student to adapt to often having limited study progress each day, whether that’s with learning new repertoire, composing a new work, or rehearsing chamber music. However, I do think this adaptation process can – and should – start before any music student goes to university. For example, I completed my ATCL Diploma on piano in 2021 during my gap year, which required a lot of consistent practice and self-discipline. The process of preparing for the diploma, which I then received a Distinction result for, really taught me a lot about how ‘little-and-often’ practice – which, when looked at on a per-day basis, often doesn’t show much study progress – really does lead to rewarding and tangible results at the end of the process.
You’ve had an impressive journey through your years as a music student: you have done all of this and you have won awards and residencies for your work! How did you balance the necessary tasks of study with your desire to push yourself towards these next-level opportunities?
I think it’s no secret that having good time management is the key to being able to take on university coursework and the many wonderful extra opportunities that come every music student’s way. Being organised with tasks and keeping to a schedule or diary can really help with improving your time management skills.
One of the great things about studying music at the University of Melbourne is that the lecturers are encouraging of you pursuing out-of-university music opportunities, and will often advertise these to students through emailed newsletters. Through such opportunities, you gain real work experience in the music industry, as well as meeting important music-industry members. Working in the music industry is all about networking and connections! Having university staff who acknowledge the importance of the skills one can gain from these extra opportunities has been really beneficial to my university study so far.
Additionally, the work put in towards these extra opportunities can often be counted towards your university coursework, depending on what you’re majoring in. An example of this happening to me was the work I composed for the At The World’s Edge Festival residency that I took up in Queenstown, New Zealand, in October 2023. The work was called Maramataka — a Māori word meaning ‘Māori lunar calendar’ — and written for French horn, violin and cello; it contributed to my end-of-year composition portfolio in November 2023.
As you’ve said, studying and working in music is heavily reliant on connection. To students entering their first year, how do you believe they should approach opportunities for networking?
I completely agree! The importance of building and fostering music-based connections, both inside and outside of university, cannot be emphasised enough.
As I explained earlier, I came to the University of Melbourne a year later than my classmates did — many of whom had shared classes at Victorian College of the Arts Secondary School together before university as well — which meant I started out a bit behind them in terms of my Melbourne-based music network.
An assessment towards the end of our first semester involved us all needing to reach out to local performers to play our compositions in a self-organised concert at the university. What helped me immensely with finding students to reach out to was, once again, asking classmates and lecturers about their connections. People at university are more than happy to help you find the right people for your projects, and everyone benefits from the web of connections that are subsequently made!
Something I’d encourage new students to do, especially in smaller classes and tutorial groups, where talking to everyone in the class is a more realistic prospect, is to make an online group chat of the people in your group or class. This is how I first got to know the people in my composition class when I started studying in Melbourne. We’d share our work with each other online, then use the online platform to arrange meeting up in person to get to know one another better and discuss collaboration ideas.
I’m now in the process of developing an exciting new concert with three other students that I met through this exact means!
Thanks for sharing your story and insights, Georgina! Before we go, what is the one piece of advice you think it’s essential for all students be aware of before they start the first class of their degree?
If it’s not for you, it’s completely OK to change paths.
Studying music, or any other degree for that matter, is a time-consuming, academically difficult, and often expensive process. But some degrees, or tertiary study in general, are not for everyone. Both of my parents, as well as my partner, changed degrees part-way through their undergraduate study to fields that better suited their interests and study expectations, and that’s completely OK to do! Don’t have any shame or guilt in changing tactics.
But, by all means, if you’re currently interested in music — or any field, actually — and are considering starting university study, just go for it. You don’t know whether something’s for you until you try it, and it’s always much better to have tried something and found it wasn’t for you than to spend more time wondering what things could have been. Giving everything a go really does have so many benefits, both at university and in life generally. It’s what I have always, and will always, strive to do.
University Music Studies: Ask Us Anything will take place via Zoom with the first event at 7pm AEDT March 12, and second event at the same time on March 14.
Register your attendance by March 7 here, or email palmergc@student.unimelb.edu.au for further information about the IgniteLAB event, including the full list of presenters.
Images supplied.
