If you want to write your college essay about music, you may be wondering about how competitive your essay topic is. And, well, that’s a fair question to ask. A lot of students ask us whether certain essay topics are okay to write about because they’re often told their topics are too cliché.

In fact, it’s very common for students to hear that every topic they choose is bad. This leads to a lot of confusion.

So, we’re going to answer the million-dollar question: is it okay to write your college essay about music? The answer is yes. However, you need to write it well enough to stand out amongst others with the same topic —and there’s a lot of people writing about music.

Fortunately, there are many ways to write your college essay about music whilst standing out from the rest of the admissions pool. Music is a fantastic topic with a lot of versatility. So, we’ve listed five of the most useful tips that we give our students when they want to write about this exact topic.

Table of Contents

1. Your College Essay is ALWAYS About You, and Not JUST About the Topic.
2. Don’t Be Afraid to Take Creative Liberty With Your Essay.
3. Focus Less on the Superficial, Focus More on the Deeper.
4. Pay Attention to Other Students Writing About the Same Instrument and Topics.
5. Consider How Admissions Officers Will INFER Your Value to the School.

Your College Essay is ALWAYS About You, and Not JUST About the Topic.

We often hear from college admissions consultants that the college essays are always about you. And, well, it’s true. The college essay IS about you. That’s because the college essays exist as a metric for admissions officers to evaluate you.

They’re tools. And, as such, your college essay should show enough about you that the admissions officers can use it to properly evaluate your fit for the university.

Now, this is where most students make a crucial mistake.

They hear from online guides, consultants, and editors that the essay needs to be more about them.

“The college essay is about you! So, write about you, you, you, you, and you!”

So, they write the essay to be very self-focused to the degree that it sounds bland and devoid of any passion. You should try to avoid this.

Here’s an example of this in action.

“I developed a passion for playing the piano when I was just a child. Since then, I’ve competed in a lot of competitions and developed my skills to the best of my degree. As I started to win more competitions, I grew a budding passion for the art of playing itself. It’s a beautiful thing, and I believe it makes me appreciate more of the artistic side of piano past the competition and the academic aspects of it. I started to appreciate playing the piano for the beauty of it, and not the external utilitarian values that came with it. And, at [University Name], I hope to do the same.”

College essay about music writing sample 1

Although the writing here looks fine, it focuses far too much on telling the admissions officers exactly what they should think rather than showing it through experience. It tells, but doesn’t show, that the applicant can appreciate music just for the sake of it without the practical benefits that come with practicing the piano.

This isn’t to say that an essay should only be “show don’t tell.” It’s about balance. And, in this case, the college essay should be a balance of showing between showing and telling about you. It’s about showing and telling about your art. It’s about showing and telling the characteristics you want to share to admissions officers.

Here’s an example.

What is Real Music?

“Music to me is…

Well, good grief. It’s impossible for someone such as myself to even articulate it properly. Despite having played through 8 competitions, practicing every day for 10 years, and having grown up in a family of classical musicians whose life and work lived and breathed the musical note, I find the deeper I dive into music the more I don’t understand about it.

Specifically, my emphasis is in the piano.

When I was still in the early years of my high school career, I took music seriously. I think, at least. Well, I took it seriously in that ‘things-in-your-to-do-list’ sort of way; or, in that ‘my-piano-instructor-looks-at-me-with-anticipating-eyes-such-that-I’d-continue-to-play-to-impress-the-aunties’ sort of way. It wasn’t until a socially isolated couple of years under the pandemic and getting infected left me too fatigued to play that I stopped playing for a little bit.

For a time, I didn’t practice the piano. And, I haven’t practiced since. Why? Well, I stopped practicing because I realized that’s not how one should use a piano. After much isolated rumination and thought under the pandemic, I stopped practicing and started playing. And…

Wow.

It was as if I had never truly played the keys of the piano before until that moment. I did, in that I would press onto white slabs and black slabs, and noises syncing in harmony would exist the piano. But, it was just calculation. It was a logical process of ‘things’, and not the way artistic expression should be. Artistic vision through the piano is to sit on that black leather seat, look not at the notes and the expectations and the shoulda’s and oughta’s that make up music theory. It’s sitting there, and letting the music play itself when the mind gets lost in that transcendent, religious way.

That’s what it means to play music. Music to me is just that. To just let it be without expectations of better or worse or shoulda or coulda or competitions or not. Music is music. And, I can appreciate for what it is. In university, I’ll appreciate learning for its utilitarian career purpose. But, I can also appreciate learning for the sake of it; with that, I’ll discover more than I could ever imagine.”

College essay about music writing sample 2

In this second essay, we use both show and tell to demonstrate what the admissions officers are supposed to get out of the essay. They can see the applicant tells them they can appreciate music in and of itself. But, they can also infer that the applicant feels a great transformation between playing for competitions vs playing for themselves. They can also infer that the pandemic had a massive impact on their relationship with music.

So, despite the main topic being about music, the admissions officers can see the essay is also deeply about the applicant. These qualities show the readers that the applicant will be a great addition to the university since the passion for learning for the sake of it is rare and often unnoticed in university settings. In addition, the ability to draw value from the pandemic and have a positive perspective in the midst of it shows the admissions officers that the applicant is capable of adapting to unusual circumstances; it’s also done without blatantly telling them outright.

Don’t Be Afraid to Take Creative Liberty With Your Essay.

This is a crucial rule for anyone who is looking to write their college essay about music, or about anything creative for that matter.

Don’t be afraid to take creative liberty.

Better yet, push yourself to take creative liberty when writing about music. The only exception to this would be a very practical “Why Us” essay that only needs straightforward answers and not narrative voices.

Other than that, the benefit of being creative with your essay is that it matches the creative topic of music. If you’re creative, then hey: be creative! Show it in your writing!

One of the best ways to write your college essay about music creatively is to ask yourself what music feels like to you by narrowing them down to its emotional category. Then, use imagery, metaphor, and symbols to depict that experience.

It can be hard to articulate how you feel and what you think about your experience with music. So, we’ve provided you with a tool you can use below. It’s called an emotion wheel.

An emotion wheel is exactly what it sounds like. A wheel containing different emotions in it. It organizes them by category and splits off into its more specific counterparts. So, for instance, some music can make you feel both amazement and interestingly enough some level of terror. This is common for those who experience music like a transcendent religious experience. It’s not just one monolithic feeling; instead, it’s a mix.

Use the wheel above to figure out which feelings you feel through music. When you have a nice set of them, look up synonyms for those feelings. Having a wider range of vocabulary through synonyms will help you write more creative descriptions.

So, let’s say that you feel both a sense of awe and love through the music you listen to and play. Here are some synonyms that come with awe and love.

1. Awe:
   • admiration
   • astonishment
   • wonder
   • shock
   • wonderment
2. Love:
   • tenderness
   • fondness
   • devotion
   • infatuation

Some synonyms here that stood out to us here are shock and tenderness. If you wanted to write a metaphor for your experience with music, you may use words and clauses that borrow elements of the synonyms you gathered.

Here’s an example.

“Music. It strikes at my soul with a tender, slow thunder so wondrous and profound that I cannot help but fall in love.”

People often wouldn’t call something profound a tender and slow thunder. After all, thunder isn’t exactly slow. Nonetheless, music can sometimes feel that way. It can feel soft and gentle for our sensibilities; yet, it can be slow and stunning like the strike of thunder that shocks our souls. Using synonyms to come up with metaphors or descriptors like this is an excellent way to write your college essay about music creatively.

Focus Less on the Superficial, Focus More on the Deeper.

One of the biggest problems with writing your college essay about music is how easy it is to talk about what is seen on the surface.

When we think of music, we think of pressing the keys of the piano; or, we think of strumming the strings of a guitar. If we want to go deeper, we may even explain how the keys of the piano feel heavy under one’s fingers or look beautiful in their pale and dark contrast between keys. Or, we can also describe how the pressure felt while strumming the strings travels up our fingers in waves.

Some of these descriptions may be good for imagery. Fine. However, it’s important to note that your college essay about music is not just about the music and the act of playing music. It’s more than the surface.

The essay should also be about you.

You can’t write your college essay about music whilst also making it focus more on you without getting deeper into who you are as a person, whether by writing it directly or by making implications about it.

Here is an example of writing content deeper than the superficial.

“To be fully transparent, sometimes music isn’t always sunshine and rainbows. Well, it started off like that when I was fortunate enough for my parents to purchase my first violin. That was a time of discovery, learning the ropes, and getting fixated on just how shiny my Rosin was and not wanting to ‘ruin’ its sleek glow by using it on my bow. That was back then, of course. However, violin to me now has become something different. I could certainly settle for saying that playing the violin is beauty, or some fancy analogy for some positive emotion. But, I think that does the world of music injustice.

Violin to me is waking up at 5:30 AM in the morning, when the cold is most bitter and the sun still has yet to rise. It means putting the rubber silencer on –because I’m a good neighbor and don’t want to wake anyone up– and practicing by composing my own music. So, I play and compose early in the morning. But, there’s more to it than just that. This is my spiritual, meditative refuge from the rest of the day. Playing the violin early in the morning and watching the sun finally start to rise provides me with an explosion of new ideas that gives the rising sun a sort of transparent truth no other time of the day provides.”

If you look at the writing here, you’ll notice that these two paragraphs actually focus less on providing deep imagery. Instead, they make implications of personality traits and temperamental patterns. The applicant is conscientious enough to wake up early in the morning. They’re also considerate enough to silence their playing music in the morning with a silencer.

By the way, if you don’t know what a violin silencer is, it’s often a rubber device placed on top of strings to muffle noise. Here’s what it looks like.

The reader can also infer that the applicant has a spiritual side to them through their insistence on playing in the morning and the meaningful, creative benefit they get from that environment.

Now, you’ll notice that the writing still covers superficial content such as the way Rosin degrades through time and the feeling of the bitter winter cold. It’s not wrong to have your college essays cover super facial content; but, it should still have a main focus on the deeper personal features of you as a whole.

Pay Attention to Other Students Writing About the Same Instrument and Topics.

Remember that music is quite a common college essay topic. Because of this, it’s especially important that you stand out among the rest of applicants through your essay.

This is especially true for those students who belong to a demographic whose population most commonly associates with music. For instance, in many Japanese households and academic circles, playing the violin is considered standard and very common. In other Asian countries, other instruments including the Piano are just as commonly played.

There’s nothing wrong with writing your college essay about music if you’re an Asian American male from the Bay Area who is passionate about playing the violin. What you do need to be concerned with, however, is the numbers game.

Will college admissions officers discriminate against you for the color of your skin or the stereotype associated with your identity? No. But, you’ll be competing against a large number of other students of the same background and writing about the same topic.

One of the most useful things you could do is look at example essays from other students of the same demographic who also wrote about music.

So, let’s say that you’re a Japanese student looking to transfer to the University of California. You’re also interested in playing the violin, and it’s had a major impact on your life. How can you write the UC essays as a Japanese transfer student? Well, start by asking some of the students who have already submitted college essays about the same topic and develop a list of common elements.

Here’s an example. This example shows common elements of Japanese transfer application essays about music.

Common Elements Ranked From Most to Least Common

1. Practice and Hard Work
2. Intros that include “the ‘subject’ + ‘verb’ as ‘subject’ + ‘verb’.” For example: The rosin flew as the gymnasium exploded in applause
3. Performing in a concert
4. Chair position
5. Being shy
6. Music as a method of calming yourself
7. Orchestra camp

Using the list of elements that are most common, you can make an educated guess on what a unique college essay about music would look like. Use this list to do the opposite, or something different. That way, you can stand out.

Let’s say you want to were originally going to write your college essay about music to include elements like #3 and #6 —performing in a concert and using music to calm yourself.

To stand out, you can instead write about how, despite practicing relentlessly to earn your position of First Chair violin, you secretly practice experimental violin methods and compose music of your own. This music could be inspired by unconventional media sources like Anime or Kpop that your friends or family would certainly disapprove of. The music also, instead of calming you, empowers you with an invigorating confidence and vigor that you often cannot express in a traditional Asian household —hence playing in secret.

(If you’re interested in learning about how to write your college essay about Anime or Kpop, don’t worry! It’s a topic we get asked about often and we have a guide on them here and here!)

Let’s see this in action.

“‘It doesn’t really mean anything’ is the most commonly touted line when it comes to selecting the right first chair violin for our school’s orchestra which, awkwardly, just so happens to choose the person who is the most talented, hard working, and best in performing during practice.

‘Like, it’s sorta random,’ my conductor said, ‘but, like, kinda…’

We’re in high school. We understand. First chair violin is a highly coveted position because it’s a position reserved for the best and only the best… kinda.

Sort of. A bit. I suppose. A little.

You can’t really say ‘the best’ without tying yourself into a pretzel of euphemisms and polite synonym for ‘better at playing’ or ‘more competitive’. I attend an institution that benefits from its reputation as a competitive school with strict hierarchies across all domains including music; yet, speaking of it is taboo.

Nonetheless, I, like many students in my community, was pushed to practice and live and breathe the Suzuki Violin practice book. I had to ‘be the best because you need to get better than Tyler Chan, who also happened to win a Chess competition last week. Oh, you didn’t hear? Aiyahhh. You need to catch up!’

That’s the Asian American lifestyle. That’s my lifestyle. I’ve known it for 18 years. Well… not including night time, so that makes it 9 years.

Oh, what? You haven’t heard what I’ve done at night in secret?

Aiyahhh! Well, I’ll keep you up to speed.

At night, I practice the violin. I suppose you could call it that. Rather, it’s more accurate to say that I play for fun with friends on a discord server. I started this secret club outside of school influence because I knew that if this club grew on campus, it would be another funnel toward winning competitions, being competitive, and all the other elements that just suck the life and soul out of artistic hobbies so well.

Interestingly, this club has become less a calming and serene moment to play. Instead, my friends and I put the silencer on our string instruments, get to a quiet spot in our house, and play our hearts out. The music we make is destruction. It’s violence. It’s beauty. It’s terror. It’s empowering. It’s all the force and strength of art that races the heart and pulses blood through the veins to introduce a chaotic element into the soul that so endearingly, lovingly, passionately empowers us and breathes life into our bodies because, if it didn’t we’d have nothing.

We’d be just another Asian American student in our suburb, climbing over one another for some chair. Joining the rat race to sort of, kind of, I suppose, a little, be the best.

Aiyahhh…”

Example College Essay About Music

This does not mean your essay will be 100% unique. After all, it’s nearly impossible for your essay not to coincide with others. However, you will certainly avoid being cliché and stand out amongst the rest of the application pool.

Consider How Admissions Officers Will INFER Your Value to the School.

This goes hand in hand with some of the advice from the “Focus Less on the Superficial, Focus More on the Deeper” topic from earlier. But, the point still stands. You need to consider how admissions officers are going to INFER your value to the school.

This means you’re NOT going to worry about telling admissions officers what kind of person you are. You can say anything about what kind of personality or temperament you have. But, it’s ultimately up to the admissions office to make any meaningful decision based on the kind of person they can estimate or predict you are. This is, of course, based on your essays.

A good way to predict how admissions officers would see your essay is to take a professional editor or college admissions counselor and ask them what your written essay makes them FEEL. They can ask about grammar, punctuation, and other minor details. But, the main focus here is the impression and feeling the reader gets.

So, get a college counselor or editor, give them a copy of your essay, and ask them their first impressions. Be sure to ask them to use basic words and descriptions that come to mind instead of their criticism or logical explanations. We’re going for feeling here.

By understanding how the counselor or editor feels from an intrinsic gut feeling, you’ll have a better understanding of the first impressions your essay gives.

If you need help with writing your college essay about music, consider speaking with an expert college admissions consultant and editor. Here at PenningPapers, we provide exactly that kind of help and can get you connected with our consultants who have helped students get accepted into some of the US News and World Report’s top schools including UPenn, Cornell, Dartmouth, etc.