Studying in Germany

I would recommend to anybody thinking about going abroad to study on an Erasmus exchange to do it, as it has been one of the best life experiences for me and for my professional development as a musician.

 The reason I wanted to go abroad was that I wanted to be able to experience a different culture by living in a foreign country and also to explore what the oboe playing style was like in Germany. I was extremely fortunate to have an amazing teacher Christian Schmitt whilst I was studying in Stuttgart who helped me with my playing enormously. I didn’t know what Christian would be like as a teacher before I went to Stuttgart, I was very lucky that he was a great teacher. I would recommend to people when they are researching where to go on exchange that they make sure they know who the teachers are at the particular institution and it does help if you can find out what they are like as a teacher. I found it also helped a lot knowing some German before I went, good as most people’s English was, I think it is a lot more respectful to try and speak the native language.

 I found it a particularly educational experience going to Stuttgart to study. I was sadly there for only three months, I wish I could have stayed longer! The Hochschule itself was a newish building (built in 2002) situated on the culture mile in the centre of Stuttgart opposite the Staatstheater and art gallery. It is open all year round with 24 hour practice facilities. Booking practice rooms was generally quite simple as every student has a student card where they can book a room on a computer for up to two hours at a time. As I discovered pretty quickly if you didn’t log into your practice room quick enough (within 10 minutes) you got locked out of the room and lost you slot....not good! This aside it was a pretty efficient way to book a practice room.

There were German language classes available which were €40 for the semester, which I found quite useful as we had three hours of classes a week. Every fortnight I had a “Vorspiel” class where everyone in the oboe class had to play in front of each other and then give feedback, which I found very useful to see what other students thought of my playing and how I could improve. It seemed that every professor decided what classes they arranged for their students rather than a main head of faculty, this meant that classes were specially tailored for what the students would most benefit from. They also each had their own teaching room which you could practice in up to two hours a day if they weren’t teaching in there. The great thing was that every professor in the Hochschule is assigned their own accompanist so it meant you could play through pieces any time you needed to for auditions or classes.