Horribly true, t-p. You have made my day.  

I wanted to chip in here a while ago, but life gets in the way, as the song has it. It's interesting to compare the UK and the USA in terms of composerly employment. I'm sure Evan and Aaron will have something to say about this, but as someone who's lived a number of years in the US I'm struck by the (even more) rigid vocational structures there than here. It seems to me that, with many an honourable exception of course, the 'career path' for US composers of 'classical' music is even more bound to a university career than it is here. Whether or how that's tied to the fact that there are more universities and colleges in the US per square mile is almost irrelevant; it seems that the 'culture' of new music there(except of the obviously commercial type) is willy-nilly forced into this environment. Add to that the heavy trend towards dividing American faculty into musicologists, composers, and theorists - a trend remarkable by its absence here in the UK - then the picture becomes even more entrenched.

Somebody (forgive me for not trawling back to see who!) applauded the many US new music ensembles which, as they do here, valiantly champion new work. You could probably find at least one in every major US city, as here. The very weird and in a way ironic difference between the two countries, it seems to me, is that so much support for new music in the US comes from private (and quite often 'old money') funds, whereas in the UK the dependence on state finance is massive, embarrassing, crippling, doomed and very depressing.

That's the theory, Richard, and was probably universally the case about 10 years ago. The very concept of a university is predicated on the idea that scholarly research is disseminated, passed from a 'master' to a 'student' almost by osmosis - and that 'teaching' arises from the enthusiasms and skills of the lecturer. But is it true for you today that 'students can to a much greater extent look after themselves, don't have to be taught how to learn, or why they're there, or what the attraction of the subject is'? Can't say it is for me, sadly, and far too much time nowadays has to be spent doing catch-up remedial work in order to get students anywhere near adequate levels of competence in very basic things. This has all been said before on this thread, I think. And, as we've also already noted, the really shocking thing is the lack of curiosity... 

Yes! But even there...

You've known the world of academia much longer than I have, martle, so can correct me if what I say is inaccurate or misleading, but I got the idea that for a long time, in both the arts and the sciences, there was a generally accepted belief that 'pure research' (meaning that which doesn't especially consider its application from the outset) is a good thing and possibly the best way to proceed - allow possible applications to reveal themselves later. So that academics were not under pressure to demonstrate the 'use value' (let alone exchange value) of their work. In Britain at least, these belief seems to have come under attack primarily during the Thatcher years, leading to a type of 'targetted' approach to government research funding, whereby priority is given to that work which can be demonstrated to have an immediate application. I know many scientists in particular were scathingly critical of this approach, arguing that the whole history of science demonstrates that it is the 'pure research' that has proved to be most beneficial in the long run; if short-term application becomes the priority, one fails to see the wood for the trees, and so on. Now for Thatcher herself, with her combination of the Protestant ethic and quasi-Victorian utilitarianist values, anything which didn't have such an immediate application, let alone any sort of academic discipline that might seem to be an end in itself, was immediately suspect - hence why she, upon one visit, she could ask one young female student what she was studying, and when the student said 'History', she responded disparagingly by saying 'What a luxury'. Now Thatcher was an abomination, a combination of philistinism, narrow-minded stupidity, aggression, provinciality, xenophobic nationalism, with total subservience to the interests of capital and promotion of the authoritarian state that protects those interests - so that the sight of this hideous monstrosity leaving Downing Street in tears was pure unalloyed pleasure. Even without this grotesque figurehead at the top, much of what she bequeathed is still taken as read and unchallenged by politicians of either party. BUT, though I loathe practically everything she did and think her 11 years in power were an unmitigated disaster which decimated most of the few decent things about this country, I would be hard pressed not to concede that there is a serious issue at stake here....

I remember thinking about this quite a bit when an undergraduate studying maths, doing a course in my third year in analytic topology, one of the most esoteric branches of pure maths. Whilst learning all about compact, Hausdorff, Tychonoff, etc. topological spaces (forgotten most of it now!), I recall chatting a bit with a post-graduate who was one of my tutors in the subject, who was doing her PhD in this, spending three or more years trying to establish if a T7 space existed, was compact, or something like that (I may recall the details incorrectly, in case any mathematicians are reading and are about to tell me that it's practically obvious that a T7 space is compact, or something like that!). I asked her in all earnestness what the possible applications of such a finding might be, and she answered quite honestly that she had no idea. I also asked more broadly what applications analytic topology had in general, even simply within the field of pure maths (I had gathered something vague about applications to functional analysis, which I was also studying, and recall the Stone-Čech compactification theorem appearing in both courses, but knew little more than this). She said - probably very little, if anything at all. Now, of course she may have been wrong, or subsequent research in the 20 years since I was studying this may have uncovered important applications; nonetheless I found it hard to relate to the mentality of spending several years in intense study of a subject of which one had little or no idea of any possible application, just as some sort of les mathématiques pour les mathématiques. I had, like others, reconciled myself with the notion that maths was an abstract art form which needed no other justification for its existence, but gradually found that notion somewhat hollow, not least if I were placed in the unenviable position of having to make a case for the public funding of such ultra-arcane branches of the discipline.

And those concerns apply in the arts and humanities as well; without at least some sort of notion of academic research having some wider meaning (which of course may only become apparent in the long-term - but how long does one wait before arriving at at least some sort of provisional conclusion in this respect?), it's not easy to make a case for why it should be supported by taxpayers. There's one of David Lodge's novels in which he considers the situation of a group of academics being involved in decisions on funding, but realising that every one of them supposedly trying to look impartially and objectively at this subject have a vested interest in its continuation. Scientists tell me that only they should make such decisions in terms of the funding of their own discipline, but how is it possible to escape such vested interests there as well? Does one not have at least the potential spectacle of a self-perpetuating group in society acting purely in terms of self-interest, uncaring of any wider concerns?

This is what I wonder about in the context of musicology. Reading as I do a lot of what is written in many branches of the discipline, I see implicity so little concern or care about any meaning the work might have save as a type of talking-shop amongst other musicologists. This is reflected in the styles of writing; whilst I know absolutely that style and content can almost never be wholly separated and that there are many occasions when a more unusual use of language is necessary to make certain types of arguments possible (how could an Adorno-ite not do so? ), the reality seems to be a lot of often quite simplistic arguments based upon a whole host of unquestioned assumptions, but dressed up in huge amounts of obfuscatory jargon designed mostly to impress other musicologists, in the manner of an exclusive language the knowledge of which signifies membership of an elite club designed primarily to exclude. Almost no interest whatsoever in how this might benefit or interest composers, performers and listeners, nor in even attempting to write in some sort of way that at least has the potential to be understood by anyone outside of the discipline. And despite continuous funding pressures, I see little in the way of any coherent attempt to make a case for the wider benefits of musicology, nor do I really believe many of the practitioners care all that much, more interested in feathering their own nest. So musicology retreats into a self-perpetuating world of its own (there are of course many exceptions, and such things as the study of historical performance practice or the preparation of editions have very clear applications), composers, performers and listeners ignore it for the most part, and it's hard to see what there is to defend against the continuing funding and other processes which undermine the very existence of the discipline (with two music departments having to close entirely in the last few years, for example). And this seems a great tragedy, because I still hold to the belief that musicology can at best produce valuable and enlightening work for a wider audience - in the process of so doing some highly specialist and rather forbidding work is often necessary, but that is a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Composers and performers (and musical administrators) happily ignore many of the issues dealt with by musicologists, which I think is ultimately detrimental and limiting (issues of music and gender, music and social class, constructions of subjectivity, the cult of the 'great man' and the musical 'genius', the implications of commercialism and the free market upon musical production, or the relationship of modes of musical communication to those of propaganda and manipulation, for example, can all in my opinion be demonstrated to have palpable implications for the very acts of composing, performing and administration of musical life). But musicologists don't seem to care all that much, more interested in impressing their colleagues and jostling for position. The divide between these 'two cultures' seems as stark as it could ever be; having a foot in both camps (and thus prone to make plenty of enemies on both sides!), I feel this very strongly.

So, to relate this to martle and Richard's points, I find it hard to imagine that students (both undergraduates and postgraduates) don't get some feeling (perhaps by this very process of osmosis that martle describes!) of the cynicism that is prevalent amongst many of those who teach them. Quite apart from the fact that students are faced by the prospect of an ever-increasingly ruthless job market where simply making enough money to live on has to take precedence over other concerns, leading to their prioritising of simply 'getting the grades', is it so surprising in this context that the noble ideals of cross-fertilisation between research and teaching are very far from the reality. How are students supposed to be convinced that much of this research is of any real value?

(apologies for the length of this post)

I would agree that they can indeed, and we ignore them at our peril, as someone once said, but some (myself half-included) might opine that they don't necessarily fall under the heading of musicology anyway.

As for martle and t_i_n's responses to my possibly naïve formulation, I suppose it could be said that I haven't been "in the system" for long enough (or entered it at an early enough age?) to have been beset in a chronic way by the problems we've been talking about. Maybe so. I'd like to think I could extract myself again if necessary.

Most non-commercial composers are publicly-funded in one way or another, though... and composers who work in a university are actually being paid to do their teaching, as well as their "research". I'm not of course saying that making the work "culturally meaningful or valuable" isn't important; I suppose I'm saying that I've always felt that such things are crucially important, and entering academia hasn't really changed the way I regard that aspect of what I do.