ABSTRACT
In the late 1980s, I attended the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, where I studied musical composition. Once a week all the composition students took a seminar along with the composition faculty. Guests were sometimes invited, but the main purpose of the meetings was for students to present their works. Most composition programs offer something like this seminar, but never have I seen one reach the level of aggression, meanness, and almost brutality of these meetings.
Just prior to my enrollment as a student at Peabody, a group of four students had so terrorized their colleagues at these seminars that they became known as “the gang of four.” This shark-pit/feeding-frenzylike atmosphere is hardly the norm for composition seminars. In fact, in the equivalent seminar at Columbia, I can remember almost the whole student body rallying around colleagues who received even mild criticisms. (I have been back to Peabody’s composition seminar in recent years, and while the discussions are still lively, the environment there, too, has become more civil.) While I can certainly think of many problems that grew out of this incredibly confrontational atmosphere (and it certainly felt awful the first few times you were publicly ripped to shreds), sometimes this environment made it possible to speak a truth that usually remains unsaid.
