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Originally Posted by Savage Clone
That is a harsh story.
Noumenal, you are sounding particularly comfortable in the vacuum-bubble world of higher academia today.
Sayin'.
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Yes, I like what I'm doing, but I'm well aware of the "vacuum-bubble." When I was at Vanderbilt, we called it the Vander-Bubble. It's pretty bad in music; there seems to be no real-world relevance to a lot of what goes on. And there is a lot of mutual masturbation going on - especially at the conferences. But there is a turn towards relevance - it just takes time because people are so set in their ways. The most depressing are the composers - man, those guys have their heads up their asses. At least with theory, there is a practical side to it. Musicians need to learn theory and there is a big move towards making theory more relevant to what people are actually doing. So theory is dividing into historians who write about Beethoven and guys who focus on all forms of contemporary music. Both are important, IMO. Two things could fix the "bubble" problem: 1. Better music education in the public school system. It should be a much larger part of curriculums. 2. A move towards relevance, which means really opening the doors to popular music studies. Some people think that the academic study of popular music is antithetical to the very nature of popular music, especially rock. But I disagree, I think the anti-intellectual attitude never did anyone any good.
I have a colleague who is a doctoral student here. He went to Berklee College of Music in Boston and is an excellent jazz guitarist. He's getting his Ph.D. in Music Theory for some reason (?) and he hates that he is forced to study classical theory almost exclusively. He has a point, but it goes both ways - you have to meet in the middle. If you have no appreciation for classical music, you shouldn't be studying music. We debate about this stuff a lot.