Composition Recitals are Dead

My friend Jonn Sokol will be having his DM recital this Sunday in Bloomington, IN. I wish him the best of luck, especially because composition recitals are so reliant on other musicians you ultimately have no control over. I will have to produce another one myself very shortly, but I believe this outdated degree requirement is completely dead: it stunts a student composer's growth to function as a real (money-making) composer.

I initially wondered why student composers had a recital requirement. I was told by one of my professors that a composition recital showed a student's compositional progression during their time spent completing a degree program. This person's right; it does. And, this argument was especially valid during the times when we didn't have digital recorders or the ability to burn CDs.

That was then; this is now: composers of my generation aren't making CDs anymore; we're posting our mp3 files onto our website, MySpace music accounts and uploading our music onto Pandora…