Mannes forces graduating students off campus
NewsComposing students at Mannes pay $53,000 tuition a year. But the school won’t let them give a graduate recital on campus.
If they want to present their work, they have to pay and display somewhere else.
Here’s a leaked email from the deeply troubled school:
Date: Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 3:22 PM
From: Bill Gustafson <gustafsb@newschool.edu>
Date: Fri, Feb 24, 2023 at 1:48 PM
Subject: Space requests for required Solo Graduation Recitals
To: Bill Gustafson <gustafsb@newschool.edu>, David T. Little <littled@newschool.edu>
Dear Mannes graduating students in Composition,
We hope this message finds you well and your final semester at Mannes progressing successfully. We are sending you this message in order to share important information in regard to space requests for required Solo Graduation Recitals.
As a reminder, graduating students in Composition do not present a solo graduation recital in order to fulfill their degree requirements. In order to satisfy the performance requirement, all composers must have at least one work performed per year of residency. These experiences can include (but are not limited to) readings and performances with the Mannes Orchestra, MACE, Composers Collective Concerts, and courses such as Composing for String Quartet taught by the Jack Quartet.
Earlier this month several composition students reserved solo graduation recital dates through the Acuity reservation system. Please note that since these degree programs do not require a recital, these reservations will be removed to allow for students with the solo graduation recital degree requirement to secure a recital date and time.
In the coming week we will be confirming the dates for our next set of readings of student compositions with the Mannes Orchestra, MACE, and the Jack Quartet that will be scheduled for April and May. We will also be reaching out to graduating students in Composition to determine if additional collective or shared performance evenings may be possible.
Thank you,
William Gustafson, Associate Dean
David T. Little, Chair of Composition
The situation isn’t nearly as dire as the headline makes it out to be.
Seems that there’s limited performance space, and instrumental/vocal majors need those spaces for degree requirements—composition majors do not; instrumental/vocal majors get priority access.
‘Earlier this month several composition students reserved solo graduation recital dates through the Acuity reservation system. Please note that since these degree programs do not require a recital, these reservations will be removed to allow for students with the solo graduation recital degree requirement to secure a recital date and time.
… We will also be reaching out to graduating students in Composition to determine if additional collective or shared performance evenings may be possible.’
No need to be obtuse.
I’m going to agree with NL on this one. I graduated from two different conservatories, which both required composition majors to present recitals, and both schools offered an on-campus venue to fulfill this requirement.
If there is limited space then maybe they need to make adjustments, ie admitting fewer students, offering more space, or something else.
Read the whole message. Ample opportunities have been set asides for composition students and all is aligned with the degree handbook. This was a little message sent out because some composition students attempted to acquire performance spaces reserved for performers (composition students enjoy the luxuries of being able to practice their craft without a practice room). The school is seeming to make an effort to balance an inequity and dole out space to composers as as requirements are filled for instrumentalists.
I read the whole message and it is not acceptable. Stop being obtuse and understand the very legitimate objection.
I attended two conservatories that offered composition majors better.
You can have a full orchestra performance or a recital. This makes this a deeply troubled school? WTF? That’s bizarre.
The point is that a graduation recital is not required for a composition degree at Mannes. With no requirement for a full recital, the school doesn’t provide a free venue.
My kid gave a sophomore string recital at a major US conservatory. Not a degree requirement, but suggested and encouraged by the studio teacher. We paid for a venue, reasonable price, close to campus that was frequently used by other students performing non-degree recitals.
A composition degree’s requirements are not the same as an instrumentalists’. Welcome to reality.
You’re trying to compare two things that are just not the same. Should non-composition majors get access to readings with school orchestra or faculty quartet?
Two other points: 1) Degree requirements are outlined online, so there’s no hidden info here when signing up for a degree at Mannes. 2) The Mannes admin seems to be making a serious effort towards allocating time/space to composition majors. When this happens, will you expect, for example, violin majors, to demand access to the orchestra to read/practice their concertos?
‘In the coming week we will be confirming the dates for our next set of readings of student compositions with the Mannes Orchestra, MACE, and the Jack Quartet that will be scheduled for April and May. We will also be reaching out to graduating students in Composition to determine if additional collective or shared performance evenings may be possible.’
This is worth applause. How often does an administration bend the rules/regulations in favor of the students?
I don’t see what the problem is. These are composition students who are not required to give recitals as part of their degree course. So it makes perfect sense that Mannes is reserving recital slots for those who actually do require them as part of their course.
Exactly!!
Well, I do see a problem, one which is prevalent in many educational institutions: composition students are treated as an afterthought, useful for the fee income, but otherwise to be brushed aside and relegated to the margins. Just look at the calendar of public events at most conservatoires, and see how often music by student composers features *prominently* as part of the headline artistic offering, and woven into high-profile events alongside other repertoire (and not ghettoised into a specialist concert comprising solely student composers’ works in an obscure corner of the building and scheduled at the same time as another event in the main concert hall). When it comes to allocating space and time for use of the building’s facilities, the interests and needs of composition students are almost always regarded as less important than other categories of student, external hires, and even outreach events.
SVM, your comment brought back old memories. When I was an undergraduate music education student in the 1970s I attended one of these concerts. It was on a Friday night, not in an auditorium or in a space designed for performances. Instead, the organizers took the student orchestra’s rehearsal room, crowded the orchestra in one half, and set up folding chairs in the other. The graduate student composers seemed pleased to have their compositions performed. I heard some interesting music that night, but none of it was particularly memorable.
About a year later as a member of the university band, we performed several graduate student compositions written for winds. I don’t recall the setting, but it wasn’t a regular concert. I got to know the music very well after rehearsing it for several weeks, but again, there was nothing memorable.
The comp students get full orchestra readings of their works, not to mention from The Jack Quartet, and the contemporary ensemble.
Their edict does do one thing for their composition grad students, it forces them to find musical ensembles, soloists and or orchestras to perform their works. Most compoers hit to cold cruel world and have no idea how to go about this and live in solitude until someone discovers them. I’m sure there is assistance from their instructors and advisors to achieve this. It also put them in front of a more varied group other than family friends and Mannes students so they get real criticism.
Standard operating procedure. What’s the big deal?
LOL, the classical music of NIMBY: Contemporary music? Great for humanity! But Not In My Backyard! Take it somewhere else, like maybe your local gym or the subway.
Man, you can’t even pay someone $53,000 to hear your music. And I thought philosophy degrees were useless.
There is no music department or music school in the world that doesn’t have a crunch for recital space at the end of the year. Have the people who need to give a recital as a graduation requirement reserve first, then if there are times left, open it up to others.
MusicBear88 That’s exactly what they did — give a 2-week jump on reservations for those with required recitals (see A Current Mannes Composer’s response). That’s what they always do. But this year staff made a clerical error that omitted some of the graduating composers, and rather than fix things for the students who were screwed, they screwed everyone over. So suddenly a benefit covered in tuition has been yanked. Sucks.
Students pay for tuition, they should be allowed to use the facilities. Why yes for performers and no for composers? Plus not requiring a recital? Sounds like lazy faculty don’t want to bother investing the extra time to attend their students’ recitals. Don’t be a composition professor then.
Your lede:
Composing students at Mannes pay $53,000 tuition a year. But the school won’t let them give a graduate recital on campus.
Accurate lede:
Composing students at Mannes pay $53,000 tuition a year. But the school doesn’t require them to give a graduate recital on campus.
To those saying “well, the composition students shouldn’t have tried to take spaces which they were not allowed to,” or “they should have waited to give people who NEEDED the venues time to reserve their recitals,” allow me to offer further context:
First, the faculty at Mannes, composition and otherwise, strongly encourages composition students to present a recital as a part of their graduation. They are both allowed and externally motivated to do so.
Second, the Acuity booking system, as mentioned in the article, is opened to students requiring a graduation recital for two full weeks before becoming available to non-required recital bookings. This system is in place to ensure that students who need a recital can procure a space. Composers waited these two weeks and made bookings after the system became open to them, they weren’t jumping in and taking slots meant for other people.
Furthermore, I need to emphasize that the listed performance opportunities in the email are a complete joke, and frankly it is insulting to insinuate that they are comparable to curating and presenting a solo recital. Having participated in all opportunities listed, I can tell you first hand that they do not yield recordings that are of any use to a composer. The one school-sponsored opportunity that I have come away from with ANYTHING useful to me was the JACK Quartet concert, which has also just been cancelled in favor of overly crowded reading sessions which do not allow the quartet enough time to actually engage with the music (all respect to their talent.)
There are FIFTY THREE composition majors at Mannes, and every single one of us is treated like an afterthought, just a way to keep interesting and exciting composition faculty on the website to attract more money into the administration’s pocket.
Of note the person writing this is none other than an eminent and exciting composer himself, one of the best living. Why would he sell out his own trainees if there wasn’t a good reason? Seems like there is a resource issue and he’s addressing it internally. The context is hard to read if we aren’t in the school. Prof. Little surely is being as fair as possible to his own field.
A crunch on space equals a deeply troubled school? How does that work out. Most conservatories don’t expect their comp students to give recitals. And there are never enough practice rooms, time available in recording spaces, or recital space. Not new. In my school, you cannot access any space on Saturday, at all, because pre-college kids take all the practice rooms and all of the facilities. Are there any schools with unlimited amounts of space?
In addition to the facts A Current Mannes Composer shares:
What the AD and comp chair aren’t acknowledging is what actually prompted the school’s first-ever (by way of abrupt cancellation, no less) refusal to host graduating composers’ recitals.
The office responsible for College of Performing Arts venue reservations, CoPA Rooms, failed to email the Acuity reservation link to all the graduating composers, though apparently all were sent the prior email alerting them the link would be sent 2/14 9 am sharp (when the competition for preferred dates and halls would begin). Another glitch in a long series of glitches from hopelessly disorganized The New School, this time over an incomplete or misused (we’ll never know) “approved graduates list” from the advising department.
Complaints were made. The CoPA/Mannes dean was involved. His assurances that CoPA Rooms pledged to make things right rang hollow when the email from underlings came a week later. To make things fair for the omitted composers, everyone was tossed? Seriously??
My kid calls it a rug-pull. I agree but would add how disingenuous it was to sweep the dirt under the rug while implying composers had somehow abused the system that deprioritized them 2 weeks behind all the performance majors to begin with. Just plain unethical and an affront to (high) tuition payers who expect better.
Private instructors who coach for months/years to prepare composers for culminating recitals were caught unaware. Kid’s preeminent mentor recommended seeking reimbursement for the cost of renting an outside venue. (And why not? A venue was always afforded before.) There are master’s students who’d given bachelor’s recitals at their former schools now bailing on their advanced recital because they can’t afford to rent space they hadn’t budgeted for. It stinks.
We have no idea when the school made senior and master’s recitals optional. All we know is that “Graduation Recital” was a listed requirement in the program catalogue as of kid’s matriculation. It has always been kid’s goal. Truly, are there elite music schools that don’t foster that?
A Current Mannes Composer is right on the money about the alternatives being a joke. My kid’s word also. I would add that MACE affords all of two students a year, via competition, the opportunity to program their work. And as far as the orchestra readings, writing for large traditional ensemble isn’t for everyone, nor is the opportunity available to everyone, per time constraints likely behind the JACK’s switch from performance to just a reading. Since when did the student-organized, off-campus Composers Collaborative Concerts fulfill requirements? Unless this is meant to include the on-campus student composer recitals that occur 3x a semester, except when 2 are officially “postponed” beyond the strike only to be cancelled rather than rescheduled for an empty first half of spring semester?
To the commenter who assumed campus solo recitals required less of the composer, that’s not the case. Wherever the venue, the composer recruits their own performers and pulls together all the programming, recording, printed programs and so forth themselves. No difference in audience either.
The nearly month-long strike last fall was consequential enough but this BS takes the cake. Kid’s former school had so much more to offer, at a fraction of the cost of attendance. It would never have robbed their composers of what for many, sadly, may be their last opportunity to hear their major works performed.