Accounting For Taste Position

If you’re a regular NewMusicBox reader, you’ve probably encountered a number of widely differing and vigorously defended opinions regarding university-employed composers on these pages. Some feel that all academic composers are hacks; some feel that all non-academic composers are hacks. Most of the brickbats thrown at gown seem to originate from town (and not necessarily down- or up-), but I’d like to voice a complaint about the American college music system from within.

My fellow students and I sometimes wax mock-poetic about the good old days when, as a friend of mine recently said, “all you had to do to get hired was not drool on the mixer.” We exaggerate; as I often argue here, most of my teachers have been both devoted educators and gifted musicians, and I have no doubt that they faced stiff competition for their seats. Nevertheless, an informal comparison of the resumes of applicants fresh out of doctoral programs in 2007 with the ones that got the baby-boomer American university composers hired back in the ’70s and ’80s reveals that you probably have to be better now than you had to be then—more prizes, more performances, more publications.

This trend shouldn’t be surprising. It goes without saying that today’s job market for university composition posts is exceedingly competitive. The number of composers in America has increased substantially in the past generation; the number of faculty positions, less so. This is good news for the students of these younger professors for whom the bar is higher than ever before. However, to ensure a consistently strong quality of education, I feel that more rigorous post-tenure review procedures are in order. Those professors who might have squeaked through in 1978 and stuck around long enough to be tenured should be held to the same (if not a more exacting) rubric as their younger colleagues with respect to both teaching and professional achievement. Every effort should be made to protect these procedures from the kind of political stain that seems, unfortunately, to color more than a few facets of academia. This is an unpopular position to espouse, I know, but students (like me) will reap the benefits. In academic composition, as in public policy, more accountability is always better.