Contemporary Music Review

ISSN: 0749-4467 (Print) 1477-2256 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gcmr20

Fitting Music Composition Studies for the 21st-

Century American University

Edmund J. Campion

To cite this article: Edmund J. Campion (2012) Fitting Music Composition Studies for
the 21st-Century American University, Contemporary Music Review, 31:4, 277-282, DOI:
10.1080/07494467.2012.726332

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2012.726332

Published online: 12 Dec 2012.

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 Contemporary Music Review
Vol. 31, No. 4, August 2012, pp. 277–282

Fitting Music Composition Studies for

the 21st-Century American University
Edmund J. Campion
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I offer a brief assessment of the state of music composition in the United States today,
with a focus on current conditions for American universities with advanced programs in
music composition not linked with music conservatories. I trace my own experiences
beginning with graduate studies at Columbia University in the 1980s, and leading to my
role as Professor of Music Composition at the University of California, Berkeley and Co-
Director at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies. I end with a laundry list
of things I have learned about music composition, what I value in teaching, how I teach,
and what advice I have for emerging composers in the United States.

Keywords: Music Composition; New Music; Graduate Studies; Computer Music;

Electronic Music

I thank Professor Mark Applebaum, the Stanford Music Department and Stanford
University for organizing this conference. As we move forward into the second decade of
the 21st century, it is fitting to take a moment to share ideas on the state of higher
education in the field of music composition. I’m grateful to be sitting with a
distinguished cast of composers who research and teach in the top-tier universities in the
USA, and I thank all of you for allowing me the opportunity to pitch in my two cents.
I will present my comments from three points of view.

(1) The global satellite view: a look at the overall state of music composition in the
United States.
(2) The aerial view: a look at the current situation of music composition as a
discipline in the American university system.
(3) The on-the-ground view: a look at what I do as a teacher in a practical sense,
and what advice I have for emerging composers in the United States.

At the moment, the state of emerging music in the United States is not healthy.
Inside and outside the walls of the university, I hear a backward and overly rigid

ISSN 0749-4467 (print)/ISSN 1477-2256 (online) ª 2012 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2012.726332
 278 E. J. Campion
signal. Electronic and computer music exists in near isolation from acoustic practice,
and work outside the accepted norm is either ignored or used in public display for
stoning. The technology boom with its strictly commercial aesthetic has helped keep
the bar low on the possible. Necessary adaption by composers to extreme cultural
circumstances has reduced the overall diversity in the landscape. I often find new and
emerging music to be featureless, directionless, and conformist.
New music creation by definition is active, alive, and dependent on continual
recycling and renewing of past music practices. For me, music remains a vital
communal activity, a necessity for the continued survival of our species. Today, most
people’s experience of music is limited to an audio signal heard through loudspeakers.
Practicing or approaching music as anything other than entertainment is becoming the
rarity. New forms of digital-based art convolve sound and image, often offering an
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interactive space to the user that requires no prior skills or special knowledge for
navigation. These things change how people understand and relate to music. It is time
again to rethink the social contract between composer, performer, listener, and sponsor.
The call is to make our activities relevant for the times and to open a pathway for
memory and experience to provide meaningful direction for today’s young composers.
I want to help further re-establish a plank that music composition remains a viable
activity, a small but indispensable contributor to the cultural landscapes of our time.
In 1985, the first day I arrived in New York City to begin my advanced graduate
studies in music composition at Columbia University, I attended a concert featuring
a full cast of the indomitable New York musicians and composers, the most
recognized practitioners of what we call serious new music. I had come to the City on
a scholarship as a poor, dedicated, and profoundly naı̈ve acolyte. That evening, I took
a hard lesson, as I witnessed a pinnacle of new music activity in serious jeopardy. The
scene and the music seemed barely alive. It was a public concert, but no one was there
except the composers and the musicians. I watched in disbelief as the royalty of New
York contemporary music acted on a game board that had lost its squares, playing for
no one, existing within a stultifying cultural vacuum. I understood that a total
breakdown in the possible significance of such music making, even to an educated
class, had already occurred. I disagree with those who have laid the blame for today’s
conditions at the feet of the composers who were working in academia at that time.
But in the same breath, I cannot forget that living only within the high walls of a
nicely tended garden will always make today’s lawn game appear to be the most
important thing happening in the world.
It turns out that my lesson in New York City was shared in different ways by many
of my fellow composers of the time. A few of those friends, like myself, have gone on
to work in universities and a few of them have died as direct results of the wounds
they suffered during those very difficult years. I am not built to be a reformer really,
but that is the stance that I must take in my role as a university Professor. If those of
us speaking with each other hope to pass on to coming generations a possible
livelihood, a chance to contribute, a chance to resist, then rapid and focused action is
the prescription.
 Contemporary Music Review 279
The number of students who wish to enter graduate programs in music
composition remains high. So too does the number of challenges we face with
fellow academics and the fast-evolving university system. Some composers have
warned me that speaking out only hastens the end, but I can’t be silent. We are
tolerated, but we are also regularly tried and convicted in a court of words, our music
disregarded as meaningless personal fluff unworthy of the superior linguistic exercise.
Musicians who have spent their lives devoted to perfecting technique on an
instrument are the most misunderstood and disregarded.
Part of the job of the composer in the university is to make new work available to
open ears, to provide engagements into the physical material of sound. I interact daily
with the most educated people in the country. I have found that this educated class
loves music deeply and often performs music. These are folks who are proud of the
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depths of their intellectual accomplishments, who might enjoy discussing Schubert’s

Trout Quintet, yet at the same time often demonstrate a lack of compass when
navigating music created since the turn of the 20th century. What I find missing from
the intellectual profile is an understanding that sound might be valuable in its own
right, that sound and its integrated modes of organization constitute a form of
knowledge. Sound is the medium through which living composers communicate. I
teach a general service course at UC Berkeley called Music Now. With over 300
students a semester, I have an opportunity to hear from sharp minds what they
experience when listening to non-commercial new music. Love of music continues to
proliferate, but knowledge and engagement with sound is absent from the
educational portfolio of most students and academics, even music majors.
Overhaul of the traditional undergraduate theory curriculum should include
subject matter congruent with today’s compositional practices. University level music
education will improve when topics drawn from Music Perception, Music Cognition,
Psychoacoustics and the Physics of Music are integrated with the traditional skills-
oriented curriculum. The history of 20th acoustic music composition, the history of
electronic and computer music along with the experimental music decades currently
doesn’t fit the training picture. It is always a question of what to include and what to
leave out. Let’s not leave out the most recent hundred years of music practice, and
let’s do include in music composition training some popular and world music
practices.
Being advanced on the institutional ladder certifies that I am not a good fit for the
role of reformer. I am a composer. I reached my half-life many years ago, and my
intention is to compose. The current university ladder-rank system discourages lower
rank faculty who have ideas for reform. I recommend an effort to incentivize the
recently tenured, the near tenured, and the adjunct faculty, to move towards a
restructured music curriculum. My colleagues in the scholarly fields renew teaching
materials frequently. As a result, the courses they teach resonate more fitfully with
young minds.
Composers must decide how they will compose given the constraints set out by the
current era of music culture. We still live in a Mozartean time where music is
 280 E. J. Campion
happening in such different ways on the planet that one must be present in a scene to
be present with that scene. Once you are present, you will morph and adapt into that
social space. Go to France and you will over time become French. With that in mind,
don’t let the accident of geographical location overly influence how you do music and
don’t get too worried if the current burning questions in music don’t seem to
concern you.
Ask yourself if you are going to compose inside today’s accepted modes of musical
expression or are you going to create by exploring and researching emerging music
practices? The reason we need to decide is that in the accepted modes case, only small
increments in innovation will be allowed. Large leaps will be considered as mistakes,
and the result will be a loss of the base of support. If the research and exploration
model is adopted, then one is free to move as far away from the patterns of current
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construction as possible—to start again from the beginning, to accept isolation, and
to go on with it. Academic positions still offer a space for unfettered research, but
there are social costs.
In the university, I serve as an information hub and traffic controller, pointing
where to go. I subscribe to the Hippocratic oath, do no harm. The best students for
me remain those that have come from the autodidact space, the ones who are self-
motivated creators. Put next to their better-trained counterparts, this more
freewheeling group has a difficult time adapting to the system. American universities
still produce composers who have excellent technical training, but the music they
write is usually poor, often disconnected from the contemporary experience of life.
The student’s job is to learn to take existing knowledge (e.g. other composers’
work, poetry, music cognition, computer programming) and translate that into an
embodied compositional practice. In music, you must own what you learn. Take the
time to know the work of your teacher, even when that work does not conform or
marry with your interests. All critique is contextual and it is the student’s job to
understand the context in order to grow. Recognize that all of us consider music a
vocation, a life guiding experience. Establish multiple bases of operation. The
composer’s work is now a manifold of many possible positions and actions. Mistakes
are a natural by-product of action.
Recognize that each stage for the developing composer offers special opportunities
only available at that particular moment. A university is a reservoir and repository for
project building. Don’t fear flying blind or on instinct for periods of time. Above all,
collaborate. Never stop taking the temperature of the times and stay aware of the
work of your friends. It is OK to be inclusive. For me, no reactionary posture or
narrow conception has ever produced music of value.
Sound is the evidence of an action from the immediate past—a blow to an object,
or the rapid movement of a membrane like a loudspeaker. It is a quickly deteriorating
trail of sonic dust. I think of music this way: that which is, that which has been, that
which will be, are all dependent on that which is.
Sound is evidence of motion—work with sound—test, verify and learn from
sound. Direct contact with performers is necessary and transformative. In the spirit of
 Contemporary Music Review 281
the Schoenberg Grundgestalt—all successful music emits from some simple core
principle of any dimension or material. Composition is about decision making—
pathological and spiral. From a starting point, a successful composer improves the
result through a chain of decisions. The Grundgestalt notion is really the opposite of
what is often taught. One doesn’t know the potential of the initial seed and may not
know the seed at all. The seed emerges from the plant, the appearance of the chicken
and the egg is coterminous.
Ideas relating to the meaning and context of one’s composition must meet and
match the actual sonic materials in the music. If the materials you are manipulating
do not correspond with your mental and conceptual frames, then your music is
dysfunctional. This is a big problem for most young composers today.
The process and working methods must be generative, open to change, and must
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match the conditions of the composer’s personality. Do you experience joy when
working? You should, most of the time, experience joy. In addition to becoming a
composer, accept that you are becoming a teacher, a meme, a carrier of cultural ideas
and practices. Infect others. Composition is similar to athletics—you must be in
constant training. Flexibility is a key and includes the ability to turn on a dime and
adjust to emerging conditions. If you stop working you will atrophy.
For me, exploring and using emerging technologies is transformative. Technology
is not only a tool, it is a metaphor at the fulcrum on the seesaw between self and
society, id and ego, romanticism and system.
I am suspicious of students who profess an interest in noise as a compositional
priority, but who are not actively pursuing or promoting new instrument building.
Electronic sound is not redeemable and will not be competing with acoustic sound
for a long time to come. When new acoustic or hybrid acoustic/electronic
instruments arrive, ones that offer sensitive control over the entire note-to-noise
continuum, then a new field of possibilities will open for music composition.
One job of the teacher is to help the student foresee and live through a path
without actually taking the time needed to experience that path. Successful
composers are only extreme versions of what they were when they began composing.
An early stage of every ambitious and sometimes talented student is the necessity to
destroy the teacher. The teacher should not take offense at this, but if need be, can bill
later for the trouble. Composition only rarely takes place devoid of careerism of one
sort or another—so it is disingenuous for teachers to ignore the context and direction
of a particular composer’s work in regard to career path.
It may be necessary to practice and rehearse a compositional process for long
periods before you actually arrive to the piece. Some composers write the same piece
over and over again, some invent music piece by piece, but the best outcomes always
sound completely intuitive. Will you take the time needed to make it? Do you have
the time needed to make it?
Composition study at the advanced level is a form of therapy with the teacher in
the role of therapist. Daniel Siegel, from his book, The Mindful Therapist (Siegel,
2012), says, ‘Whatever the individual approach or clinical technique employed, the
 282 E. J. Campion
therapeutic relationship is one of the most powerful determinants of positive
outcome in a range of studies of psychotherapy. . . Why is our presence—not just the
interventions we offer or the theoretical stance we take. . .the most robust predictor of
how our patients respond?’
Siegel coins a number of terms that I think are worth considering when thinking
about teaching music composition: ‘Presence: The way in which we are grounded in
ourselves, open to others and participate fully in the life of the mind are important
aspects of our presence at the heart of relationships that help others grow.
Attunement: As signals are sent from one person to another, we have the opportunity
to tune in to those incoming streams of information and attend fully to what is being
sent rather than becoming swayed by our own preconceived ideas or perceptual
biases. Resonance: the physiological result of presence and attunement is the
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alignment of two autonomous beings into an interdependent and functional whole as

each person influences the internal state of the other. Transpiration: a term that
signifies ‘‘breathing across’’ and is intended to signify the ways in which breathing
across all the various domains of integration we’ll be exploring in ourselves and
others actually can dissolve the top-down influences that make us believe we are
isolated beings. . .Transpiration is a state of awareness that inspires us to rewire our
brains toward the reality that we are all a part of a living whole. We retain our
individual identities while fully joining as a ‘‘we’’.’
So now let me finish here today. Sometimes looking at things outside your
perceived field of interest, is just what you need to add life to your creation, to create
a truly original work, and help you move forward in your work. Sometimes the
addition of a small element is what turns a sow’s ear into a silk purse. Let it rest, when
you come back much later add that small element, be joyful.
As a postscript, I leave you with a two-page essay written by poet John Campion
(Campion, 2012). These two pages were born in part from a decade long
collaboration and discussion with my brother—an effort to recognize in each the
possible worlds that open when poetry and music share their relatedness. I highly
encourage you to take ten minutes and read this.

References
Campion, J. (2012). Discovering and composing with logos. Ecotropic Works. See Appendix 1.
Siegel, D. (2012). The mindful therapist: A clinician’s guide to mindsight and neural integration. New
York: W.W. Norton & Co.