Music school vs. musical school [closed]
Solution 1:
The word musical has three slightly different meanings:
- Having to do with music, as a musical instrument
- Euphonious, as a musical tune
- Skilled or interested in music, as a musical poet
The OED records that they all entered the written language at about the same time, circa 1420. There's likely not a rule that dictates which nouns take the adjective musical and which take the attributive noun music. For instance, the Ngram viewer finds few instances of music talent as compared to musical talent -- the latter favored by over 75:1 --, but the google shows roughly equal hits. Both methods find music school preferred over musical school. The google finds over 16M hits for the former; 355K, for the latter, although there used to be a New York institution called the Goodrich Private Musical School. The problem will musical school is that it brings to mind a school that can carry a tune instead of a school that can teach one to do so.
(Warning: I haven't accounted for false drops in the google, which will count such things as "the musical, School of Rock".)
Solution 2:
The problem is that music school is not an adjective followed by a noun. It is two nouns, a compound noun.
- music school
- agriculture school
- carpentry school
- engineering school
- nursing school
- drama school
- masonry school
These are all schools where one goes to learn about, or to become, the noun given in the first position. They are all “schools of/for/about X”, not “schools that are X”. The nursing school is not nursing any grudges nor infants; rather, it is schooling nurses.
That means when you try to say musical school, people will assume that musical is not an adjective but a noun! They will understand it, at least in writing where stress in not expressed, that you are going to a school to learn about musicals, not some school that happens to carry a tune well.