academia again

>I've thought about it. If academia is to be pigeonholed, then it is best >considered an industry.

Not a bad thing, or good, just interesting. They are a personnel service. One that happens to employ a large number of people in its own right.

Seen this way, one can understand why it might seem shady to work for them. Like being a lawyer, you're on the inside of a narrow but essential operation; a vertical (rather than horizontal) industry.

Like other industries whose principle source of income is not directly subject to supply and demand (like donation and tax), bureaucracy flowers.

Departments may be evaluated by the ratio of people they employ to the ratio of people they place outside. Hard sciences tend to have low values. Other departments have, in the last 50 years, become almost completely self-absorbed (high values). Look at what's happened to lit crit.

Unfortunately, composition/theory is definitely in this group. Like deconstruction, serialism may be cool in its own right, but nobody to my knowledge has ever come forward with any reason why serializing things should be interesting. Then we have various "process" methods, the point of which are that results don't count (aside from the initial folk-ethic shock value; hanging a snow shovel in a museum to say that art can be a valuable part of everyday human life).

It boils down to this: music of the type made by Bach and Beethovan is not coming out of academia. It came out of the south, then from England -- the folk ethic does produce results! There are a handful of exceptions, almost all of them pre-1940, almost all of them with less-than-complete ties to academia.

-C.

It boils down to this: music of the type made by Bach and Beethovan
is not coming out of academia. It came out of the south, then from
England -- the folk ethic does produce results! There are a handful
of exceptions, almost all of them pre-1940, almost all of them with
less-than-complete ties to academia.

Joseph L. Monzo monz@juno.com
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/monzo/homepage.html
|"...I had broken thru the lattice barrier..."|
| - Erv Wilson |
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