Slightly more than 15 years ago, soon after finishing my doctoral studies, I had the great fortune of studying with Morton Feldman for 3 intensive weeks. These sessions proved to have a great impact on my career as a composer and pedagogue and I was fortunate to be able to count Morty as a friend as a result of those three weeks. One day not long after his death in 1987, I came across an article he had written entitled “Boola Boola” published in a collection of his essays by Berlinger Press, in which he strongly criticized academia. At first this seemed a bit contradictory; he was after all a Professor of Composition at SUNY Buffalo when I met him. However the article written much earlier was still consistent with the criticisms he continued making even after he was in academia. Given my own continual strong criticisms of the composition world in the US (which consists of large numbers of people involved with academia), I have been challenged by several colleagues to write a short article expressing my concerns at the end of the 20th century. The following is a summary of these concerns…
