Been a while since I did one of these.
A couple years ago, I wrote a lengthy post as part of this blog series about how I didn’t need or want a doctorate. While a lot of that is true (though I no longer take weekly trips to Disneyland, which is also a good thing), I have an update to this particular line of thinking.
On December 1st, 2025, I decided to apply for a PhD program in composition on a complete whim. I didn’t overthink it, and I chose four works that most represented the evolution of writing practice over the last few years (Wasatch Crest, Three Aviaries, Marine Layer, and All This to Say), revised my CV, and fished out my transcripts from old emails to myself. The most difficult part of the application was the personal statement, which I wrote in about 45 minutes and was centered on something that would actually be a good reason to get a doctorate in music composition: to become a better teacher.
As a composition field, we don’t really know how to teach composition. There, I said it.
We know how to refine existing music, but we don’t know how to teach people to write. We know how to teach people what specific instruments can and cannot do (instrumentation), how to teach how instruments interact with each other to produce specific sounds (orchestration), how to teach composers to imitate specific styles (music theory), how to teach which composers led different musical movements and when they did so (music history), and (kind of) how to teach composers how to build communities that will support them (music business).
We do not, however, have a good understanding of our own music composition pedagogy. And this is a huge problem, and I’m going to tell you why.
The composition field only rewards composers who ask for forgiveness instead of those who ask for permission. We reward the intrepid few who figure out how to compose on their own with no direction, treating those willing to experiment freely preferentially because we didn’t have to put in any work in the initial stages of their educations.
But as a composition teacher, I have met a lot of musicians who have said, “I would to compose, but I wouldn’t know where to start.”
And that’s because we don’t teach them how to start composing. We have never needed to teach people to start composing because even in our introductory courses, we are most rewarding students who already composers.
This ignores a potentially massive population of composers out there who need a helping hand to get them into writing music, a population that has become my bread and butter as a composition teacher.
Through lessons I have taught and continue to teach, I have developed beginning composition pedagogy. Derived from lessons in my undergrad, the study of counterpoint, and a reduced approach to set theory, I have successfully been able to lead people into composition who would not otherwise have been composers.
Doctoral performance students (and many performance students seeking master’s degrees) learn the pedagogy of their own instruments, but similar course are absent in composition degree paths. It’s one of the big things that’s kept me from applying to most institutions, because if I’m going to devoted three or more years of my life into getting the terminal degree in my field, I better be able to walk out of it a better pedagogue. As a result of not teaching graduate students how to teach composition, we simply regurgitate the lessons of our teachers to our students in the hopes that they will learn something, throwing everything at the wall just to see what sticks.
I think there’s a better way of teaching composition than that.
There a few institutions at which questions of composition pedagogy are being asked and explored, and I chose one such institution because I believed that I would be able to find a place that my research could be championed and housed.
That is what led me to apply for a doctorate in composition: to be better able to serve a population of beginner, non-degree seeking, and/or avocational composers which is genuinely ignored and passed over by the vast majority of our field.
And, I am proud to say that’s the vision, combined with the strength of my portfolio and experience, that got me accepted to the institution for which I applied.
The project (and me, and my music) was not, however, worthy of institutional funding.
There are a lot of things about getting into a doctoral program but not getting funded that do not make sense to me.
First, why accept more candidates than for whom you have funding available? In a pervious application cycle, I was in a similar situation in which I was waitlisted instead of accepted contingent on the availability of funding. At time, I was disappointed, but now, having gone through what I went through this cycle, I have a lot more respect for that institution.
Second is the process itself, in which I and the rest of the pool of finalists were asked to provide an additional essay for funding consideration separate from the application itself on an intentionally vague prompt, which I evidently failed. This was a red flag for a lot of reasons, especially so when I inquired for a syllabus with necessary information to answer the question poised and all that was provided to the applicant pool instead was a even more vague course description. The decision to make funding contingent on one’s answer to a shot-in-the-dark question that was not asked of all applicants was at best unsettling, and, at worst, a hurdle designed specifically to exclude specific applicants from funding.
And third, if wanting to become a better teacher for a demonstrably ignored population of composers by developing formal pedagogy for beginner composers is not a good enough reason be funded for a doctoral program in music composition, what is?
The answer, of course, is simple. It’s not that my educational focus for a doctoral program is not good enough to be funded by an institution; it’s that a focus on developing pedagogy for beginner composers undermines the power institutions have over saying who is and who is not allowed to be a composer at all.
The reality is that the composition students who I am championing were made irrelevant to the composition field by academic gatekeepers and those gatekeepers would like it to stay that way. The composers who evaluated my application know that doctoral composition students are extraordinarily unlikely to attend without funding, and that by choosing to not fund a project like the one I would want to do with a doctorate in composition, they have acknowledged that beginner, avocational, and non-degree seeking composers are not a pedagogical priority for them.
And if that’s the case, there’s little I can do within academia to make space for those composers. Which leads me to believe that sometimes you need a non-academic solution to a problem that academia created.
But I also believe it’s not just a problem for composers who need permission to learn to compose. There’s an even bigger fallacy in choosing not to formalize beginning composition pedagogy within academia, and it’s resulting in a terrible music literacy issue that has undermined us all.
Sometimes we refer to music as a language. While referring to music as a “ universal language” is problematic, imagining music as language is illuminating because we actually do have a good understanding of how to teach languages.
In order to teach language, students need to demonstrate proficiencies in three areas: they need to be able to speak the language, they need to be able to read the language, and they need to be able to write the language. Becoming proficient in all three results in linguistic fluency.
In the general study of music, we put emphasis on teaching speaking the language (the performance of music) and on teaching reading the language (music theory and musicology). We do not put equal emphasis on writing music, often foregoing it altogether, which is resulting in incomplete musical literacy.
And this is the fault of composers. In our failure to teach beginners and our reliance on the emergence of young composers through their own experimentation (this is why we have the term ‘emerging composer’, because we don’t include beginners at all in our community), we have chosen to condemn the entire field to incomplete musical educations. In our failure to serve equally populations of composers who ask for forgiveness in their experimentation in making music and populations of composers who crave permission to create, we have manufactured a problem that percolates through our entire understanding of what we do and how we do it.
These are all problems that, apparently, we need to solve outside academia, which is I will most likely never get a doctorate in music composition. Somehow (and perhaps despite) not having or being able to get a doctoral degree in composition, I am increasingly become a subject matter expert on the teaching of it, at least through bibliographical mastery alone, which, hilariously, I already have.
So I’m going to write the dissertation I would have written as a book without institutional support. I’m going to keep trying to make space for composers the system wants to choose to ignore. I’m going to do what I can to help people become more literate and capable musicians. I’m going to create pedagogical materials for beginning composers of any age and create a community around avocational composers who want to learn because they love learning. And I’m going to keep making music both as a composer and a performing, reserving space on programs for my students so that they can build relationships with my collaborators and occupy the space they deserve.
I don’t need a doctorate for that. There are a lot composers I might have been able to help by getting one, but I’m going to have to find another way.
Putting aside the insult of getting accepted but not funded and the upheaval I have experienced because of it, I am unlikely to ever apply for a doctoral program again. I have lost all faith in the process. It’s unpaid, unrewarded labor, time spent and energy expended that I will never experience reciprocated.
In the end, I’m not angry or disappointed or embarrassed by getting accepted but not funded. I’m sad, not for me, but for whom I actually applied to help: my students, present and future. They’re the ones who got slapped in the face (again), told they weren’t welcome (again), and disregarded (again), certainly not by me, but by the academic composition community, who refuses to include them by choosing to exclude me.
I have better things to do than fret over an institution that I will never attend. I know I can better serve real students who need me. I have more important things to do than waste my time getting accepted without funding ever again, and I have things in my power that I can do to make things better for beginner and avocational composers and for musicians who want more musical literacy. I know I can build a better creative community than the one which I tried to join to serve the students who need me most, and that’s what I’m going to do.