composer FAIL #51 with stats

I think I have almost fully recovered from my comp comp a week ago,¹ so therefore I must return to the land of the living. Thus, posting a composer FAIL is the first order of business.

This is no ordinary composer FAIL. In fact, this particular rejection letter gives me (and also you dear readers) valuable insight to the statistics and process of landing the elusive higher-education music composition job. Here we get a glimpse of how many of us are applying for this position and exactly who we are.

We know that landing a tenure-track music composition/theory job is almost impossible: the supply of composers with doctorate degrees (or almost doctorates, in my case) greatly outweighs the demand for such people. In other words, there are too many of us: there are not enough higher education jobs to sustain us graduates. If you are persistant, like Christian Carey, you will land that tenure-track job—after fourteen years.²

So anyway, I received my rejection letter in my inbox, and this emplo…