<p>This is an essay by a historical musicology PhD grad from Stanford.
Composed</a> in Hypocrisy - ChronicleReview.com</p>
<p>Not surprising. I have heard similar complaints about PhD programs, academic politics and working conditions in many other fields. Welcome to the NFL, rook.</p>
<p>Visions of Clockwork Orange, “It was Ludwig Van!!”</p>
<p>I couldn’t get the link to open. Anybody else have issues?</p>
<p>If the link doesn’t work for you, this is the essence of the complaint (it is a response to AMS taking a position against using music for torture):</p>
<p>By torture I mean “trivial” forms of academic distress, like applying for a job or fellowship in full suspicion that it has already been promised to someone else. Or witnessing prot</p>
<p>I can’t open it either. Was the above a quoted passage? Interesting…thanks!</p>
<p>p.s. love the “eery silence” line…</p>
<p>it’s a quote. This fellow evidently didn’t find a job; the market can be brutal, and was particularly bad this year, with all the hiring freezes. It’s in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Here’s another try at the link: [Composed</a> in Hypocrisy - ChronicleReview.com](<a href=“http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i35/35b01001.htm]Composed”>http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i35/35b01001.htm)</p>
<p>that worked-thanks!</p>
<p>any place to read the article if you do not have a subscription?</p>
<p>Probably not online without a subscription. Perhaps a public or university library, a relative or friend with an online 'script you could temporarily access.</p>
<p>Another thought is pm’ing the OP. They may have saved the article in it’s entirety. A lot of us “music folks” tend to do that. It may have been republished elsewhere. You can try googling. This came up [bookforum.com</a> / blog](<a href=“http://www.bookforum.com/blog/archive/20090505]bookforum.com”>http://www.bookforum.com/blog/archive/20090505). You need to register, but I did not go deeper to see if it was a free or paid service.</p>
<p>sorry; I didn’t save it. But the section I posted was the heart of the article.
It was quite controversial, with lots of hostile responses in the AMS community. No doubt the fellow who posted it will have a tough time… The job market in musicology has been very tight this year, with many colleges, including Stanford, postponing hiring. Harvard has talked of cutting back on graduate student acceptances across the board, which may affect musicology (they take about 3 students in Music History a year; they also have composition, theory, and ethnomusicology PhD’s).</p>
<p>Sounds like everything I have heard levelled at Academia (though believe me, same thing happens in the ‘real world’ of business, where things are controlled by a small group of managers, where orthodoxy reigns and where nepotism and power alignments lead to advancement over merit…and in a small world like musicology, it is even worse since you have a smaller group which is easier to control and influence. The Brahmas who have gotten to the top, so to speak, make the rules and enforce their ways…and I have heard more then a few people talk about the lack of diversity in musicology and music departments, that usually there is an orthodoxy that people wishing to be part of it or studying in it better follow…for example, by reputation one music/composition program (grad) in the Ivy league has the reputation for accepting and training those who are into the 20th century minimalist/serialist style and that anyone who doesn’t think this is music are not going to do well or get in there (having heard some of the students music who are in the program,I don’t find it hard to believe, everything was a poor imitation of glass and reich…). </p>
<p>I think the idea of academia as a place of divurging views may be one of those nice little pieces of myth that never really existed. In the early decades of the 20th century, for example, academic music and musicology departments were hotbeds of worshipping at the feet of European music and musicological ideas, and someone who for example tried to promote jazz as an American form of music would find their careers derailed, or tried even in many cases dealt seriously with the music of Copeland, Ives or Gershwin. It is kind of ironic today, that it appears to me that disciples of the minimalist/serialist school of music,who in the past 30 years have ‘taken over’ many schools of music, are doing the same thing that was once done to them…so I suspect things don’t change much.</p>
<p>Did the person who wrote this not make the efforts to protect his or her identity? Otherwise, it seems to me like pure suicide of a career!</p>
<p>Sure academia is not a 100% level playing ground. Anybody who considers a career in academia will figure that out very very soon - so I don’t know exactly what demographic he was aiming this paper at. Perhaps at future musicology students in order to defer them from entering to field, to cut down future competition?</p>
<p>I don’t doubt his thoughts are genuine, nor do I doubt that they are very true on many counts. However, it seems like common knowledge with anyone inside the profession. He is probably just bitter - and having spent 5+ snobby years in a super selective PhD program (A-level university PhD programs very often accept only 1-2 applicants out of 100-150 pools) confined in bliss and gloating, he has now entered the real world and is discovering how very tough it is.</p>
<p>PS - musicprnt, I think I can well guess which of the Ivy League school you are refering to. ;)</p>
<p>There is very much still a strong following of 1960s-1980s minimalism in the U.S. but of course many composers are trying to break that image. I have studied abroad in the UK - and there is a very common misconception there that every American composer is either writing post-minimalism like John Adams, or is composing tuneful and tonal music for bands and wind ensembles.</p>
<p>“In a rare display of social awareness, the American Musicological Society has publicly denounced the use of music in physical and psychological torture.”</p>
<p>If they find a way to enforce that rule how will Britney Spears make a living?</p>
<p>One of the most fascinating parts of Beethoven scholarship is the unstated, but still resonating canon of musicologists whose viewpoints are frequently peer-praised, but rarely questioned. This group includes Joseph Kerman, Theodor Adorno, Kinderman, Lockwood, Thayer, Solomon etc. The author’s characterization of the academic realm as a supreme court is similarly apropos when scholars such as Schindler are permanently disgraced and thereby excommunicated from the almost incestuous pool of Beethovenian knowledge. In Robert Winter’s fascinating analysis “Origins of Op. 131”, Winter opens the book by first acknowledging the fact that he is about to challenge a few longstanding ideas of Beethoven’s “favorite” quartet. What force inspires such fear? The ghosts of Beethoven scholarship’s past?</p>