Jon Appleton
Composer, author and Arthur R Virgin Professor of Music at Dartmouth College and Visiting Professor of Music at Stanford University and University of California, Santa Cruz.
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Dartmouth is the place I’ve devoted my life to, so it’s very sad to see this kind of decline in the intellectual strength of the institution.
The pressure to give A grades is intense. It comes from the students and increasingly from their parents as well.
If you think this was an isolated incident, let me paraphrase Pastor Martin Niemoller, "First they came for the music faculty and I did not speak out because I was not a musician. Then they came for the psychologists and I did not speak out because I was not a psychologist. Then they came for the biologists and I did not speak out because I was not a biologist. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me."
Nowadays, all students have access to and indeed most own computers and are comfortable with the software used to compose music. There are probably too many musical options for them now and the trick is to limit the number of musical ideas so as to develop structure and continuity in their work.
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