Composition: choosing a school and faculty mentor

SpiritManager
Wed, 20 Mar 2019 20:13:39 +0000

Often in composition one ends up working with all the composition faculty - one is assigned to a different one each semester. It’s different than instrumentalists. That is how it worked for my son as an undergrad at Bard, and a grad student at Yale. The student can request to keep working with the same professor but for various reasons that’s often not an option - whether by policy or practicality.
So it is best to choose a program where there are a number of professors with whom the student would like to study at some point and where you trust the aesthetic and philosophy of the department as a whole. It’s also very hard to know in advance which professor will be most helpful in a particular point in a composer’s development.