I am unlikely to get a doctoral degree in music composition. It’s not just that I don’t need one, or even that I don’t really have any more faith or respect for the academy’s bureaucracy. It’s that I don’t want one.
I have applied three times to DMA and PhD programs across the country, spending thousands of dollars in application fees, a backbreaking amount of emotional and mental labor, and countless hours on what would become fruitless applications. I got waitlisted once, but every other application was a rejection.
Getting rejected is hard, but getting rejected for a doctoral program is something else. It’s more than just not getting an award or a grant or a job; it’s the act of putting your entire life on hold for another year as you hustle to create a better application for the next cycle. Applying repeatedly for these programs takes a huge toll on you because it means you wasted the last year of your life trying to improve upon yourself until you’re good enough for someone else. You’re stuck in this cycle until you either give up or you are deemed worthy.
And I can’t really justify putting myself through that again.
I will not sacrifice my own mental, physical, and emotional health to get rejected from academia again. I do not understand what these degree programs are looking for if not me. I am an accomplished composer, an already seasoned researcher with valuable expertise and an excellent academic track record, a passionate new music practitioner, and a blossoming pedagogue with a thriving group of wonderful composition students. I have everything it takes to be successful in a doctoral program. I am not the problem.
What is a doctorate in music composition, anyway? It’s a certification to indoctrinate composers into being okay with the way the academy treats them. It doesn’t really center developing additional musical expertise or improving the pedagogy of teaching composers or even the research that goes into creating a large work. Do I really need a doctorate just to get saddled with a slew of committee assignments instead of spending my time writing or teaching people to write? All that a doctorate in music composition would provide me with are the skills I would need to perpetuate a toxic culture that sucks the life out of everyone involved in it.
And I don’t need that.
I would find it very difficult to justify subjecting myself to what I have watched friends and loved ones go through to get their doctorates. I don’t want to uproot my entire life in order to spend a few years living like a graduate student again. I am currently surrounded by houseplants and midcentury modern furniture, enjoying a glass of wine at 2 in the afternoon on a Monday because I’ve already finished everything I need to do today. You think I want to give this up to go back to school? Give me a break.
Don’t get me started on giving up my weekly trips to Disneyland.
And for what? For someone else to tell me that my work isn’t good enough? The other thing I’m coming to terms with is that I already work at a doctoral level. In another world, Three Aviaries could have been my doctoral dissertation, and my projects have only gotten more nuanced since. I have a 30 minute long clarinet quartet based on a tasting menu. Two of the projects that I know I have coming up after hiatus are going to be bigger and more emotionally complicated than Three Aviaries. Do I really need a doctorate to work at a doctoral level? No. The answer is no.
I am already a professional composer. I do not need a doctorate.
I have no faith that there is space for me in the academy, and even if there was, I feel like I would spend my entire academic existence fighting to break down a hostile system from the inside. There are people who can do this, and who are doing that kind of work within academia.
I respect them for it, but I also need it to be okay that I don’t have that kind of energy for that kind of work.
I am a composer. A creative at heart. The best way I can change the world is by writing music. It’s not going to be encouraging the next generation of composers to pursue a comfortable plush office or heading up a committee on DEI opposing old white cishet men that are just going to retire in a couple years anyway. It’s going to be at my desk, plunking out notes on my keyboard as I figure out how to express what it is I need to say in my music and helping other composers be the best composers they can be.