When we composers are “off the clock,” so to speak, how does it benefit us to hate certain kinds of music?

I’d like to defend the legitimacy of the academic composer. I don’t fully grasp how one could be a composer in the USA without a university position and still manage to stay afloat financially.

New shoes, sharp pencils, and some thoughts on academia as I start
the 18th grade.

The further into a piece of music you get, the less sense it makes; as composers we can explore this paradox.

How much do you charge for the music that you compose?

Is there anyway to persuade the wealthy from buying seven-figure classical music relics and, instead, spend the cash on cultivating a rich musical culture; the likes of which that spawned icons like Beethoven?

I’d like to focus this week on a particular musical urban legend: Everybody who’s hip to the Smiths seems to know someone who was saved from suicide by the their music.

Say you’re a composer who’s about to get married. What do you do about
music?

You may recall that the Yale School of Music’s
hundred-million-dollar endowment was one of the biggest news stories of
last year among our kind. The even bigger story was what that endowment
would be used for.

If you haven’t read Randy Nordschow’s piece on composer bios, read it right away (then come back here immediately). It’s great—so great that I couldn’t resist ganking his subject for further exploration.