Just quick note to let you know that Taukay has added Sen­sa­tional Rev­o­lu­tion in Med­i­cine to its cur­rent web radio rota­tion, to play every 30 hours for the next month. Their cur­rent playlist also fea­tures many of the other com­posers on the AMP roster.

The chal­lenges of learn­ing com­po­si­tion in academia

I’ve always said that I learned despite my edu­ca­tion and not because of it, and after my master’s degree I decided to put my money where my mouth was and not pur­sue a PhD—much to my relief, the com­mis­sions and com­pos­ing con­tin­ued any­way. A few months ago I read a great arti­cle in Slate by William Pan­na­packer that really struck home for me. The basic premise was not that new: uni­ver­si­ties are mak­ing them­selves irrel­e­vant in the human­i­ties, arts, and sci­ences. What was refresh­ing, how­ever, was that this wasn’t an anti-intellectual rant, it was just an hon­est exam­i­na­tion of what higher edu­ca­tion as an insti­tu­tion is try­ing to do and how it thinks it should fit into soci­ety. So what if your goal is to be the best com­poser pos­si­ble and to have your music heard by other peo­ple who are inter­ested in sim­i­lar types of music? Should you get a degree in com­po­si­tion? Con­tinue read­ing “Why Com­posers Should Drop Out of Uni­ver­sity (and What They Should Be Learn­ing), Part 1” »