Friday, August 11, 2006

Academic composers and blogging

Very few composers with blogs have institutional affiliations, and those academics who are blogging tend to be low-intensity.

While I happen to be fond of the present mix of composers holding forth online, I do have some curiousity about why so many of the famous composer-incubators maintain net silence. I get a lot of emails asking for recommendations for schools, and I can give some private or anecdotal information, but it seems to me that these places are missing some competitive opportunities in not better presenting their activities online. Is the activity in the breeding and training rooms really so intense that there's just no time for public small-, medium-, and largetalk? Is there fear by the untenured that risking a controversial viewpoint before an unknown audience can be a career-buster? Are they afraid of leaking to many tricks-of-the-trade, bon mots, or lecture-filling anecdotes? Or is that music faculties - traditionally among the most structually conservative departments of universities - are just slow to recognize value in the medium?

Addendum - I should have mentioned Roger Bourland's blog Red Black Window, the exception - a genuine tenured composition professor from a really big school with a lively blog - that proves the rule. There is also that blog by the composer-critic-musicologist- who-shall-not-be-named, so I won't.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What schools do you recommend?

Daniel Wolf said...

I write a post on this topic soon.