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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 September 2022
The increasing precarity of arts academic jobs, combined with a much needed focus on equity and decolonisation, are de-privileging and destabilising the experimental music tradition and contemporary composer identity. As a result, composition departments are pursuing a paradox: scrambling to focus on specific marketable skills while also broadening the genres taught. After teaching in a composition department, a generalised arts department and a prison college programme, I describe methods to provide skills training for students interested in different genres, even if those genres are not the specialty of a department's faculty. These include: (1) discrete ‘levels’ of creative thought, from high-level questions of art's purpose to ground-level skills training; (2) creative process assignments, in which students plan and document their way through a prompt, developing a practical discipline into which desired skills can be incorporated; and (3) formal spaces for students to learn from each other, one-on-one, getting deeper into the similarities and differences they have. The goal is to empower students not simply via marketability, but by developing a sense of vocation without tethering creativity to employment, so that students may more realistically and more potently design their own lives in music.
1 Iddon, Martin, ‘The Dissolution of the Avant-Garde’, Search Journal for New Music and Culture, 1 (2008), p. 5Google Scholar, www.searchnewmusic.org/index1.html (accessed 20 January 2022).
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Brown, Lawrence, The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021)Google Scholar.
5 See Ward, Joanna, ‘Decentring and Dismantling: A Critical and Radical Approach to Diversity in Tertiary Music Education’, TEMPO, 74, no. 294 (2020), pp. 65–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Fox, Christopher ‘Editorial: New Music and Old Colonials’, TEMPO, 75, no. 295 (2021), pp. 3–4Google Scholar.
6 Nebal Meysaud, ‘It's Time to Let Classical Music Die’, NewMusicBox, 24 June 2019, https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/its-time-to-let-classical-music-die/ (accessed 18 January 2022).
7 Tony Herrington, ‘White Out! Tony Herrington Calls Time on the Monoculture That Is the Experimental Sound and Music Industry’, The Wire, July 2020, www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/white-out-tony-herrington (accessed 20 January 2022).
8 Lewis, George, ‘Improvisation after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives’, Black Music Research Journal, 16, no. 1 (1996), pp. 91–122CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 See Gary Ingle, ‘Decolonizing Our Music’, NewMusicBox, 16 November 2016, https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/decolonizing-our-music/ (accessed 24 January 2022) and Maddy Shaw Roberts, ‘Oxford University Professor Suggests “Decolonising” Music Syllabus to Make It Less “White European”’, Classic FM, 29 March 2021, www.classicfm.com/music-news/oxford-university-decolonising-music-syllabus/ (accessed 24 January 2022).
10 Valia Leifer, ‘Music Department to Adopt New Curriculum Beginning Fall 2017’, The Harvard Crimson, 22 March 2017, www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/3/22/music-concentration-changes/ (accessed 20 January 2022).
11 Ian Power, ‘Esthesic Becoming and Actualized Work: An Artist's Statement’, Medium, 17 March 2017, https://medium.com/@ianpoweromg/esthesic-becoming-and-actualized-work-an-artists-statement-2015-preface-562c51cb102b#.w31d47z99 (accessed 24 January 2022).
12 Power, Ian, ‘The New Musical Imaginary: Description as Distraction in New Music’, TEMPO, 73, no. 289, (2019), pp. 6–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 ‘The Columbia [film] program offers the most extreme example of how elite universities in recent years have awarded thousands of master's degrees that don't provide graduates enough early career earnings to begin paying down their federal student loans, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Education Department data.’ Melissa Korn and Andrea Fuller, ‘“ Financially Hobbled for Life”: The Elite Master's Degrees That Don't Pay Off’, Wall Street Journal, 8 July 2021, www.wsj.com/articles/financially-hobbled-for-life-the-elite-masters-degrees-that-dont-pay-off-11625752773 (accessed 24 January 2022).