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I think it's a mix of both...

Perniciosus (the title of the work) stands for "the one who corrupts" in Latin. The whole idea was to (sic) find a way to transfer energy from the composer to the performer and from the performer to the audience alike. Like there is a connection between the three. So back in 2005 I felt that I had to go exactly that way because I was hoping very strongly for the "yikes!" sentiment from everyone!

Of course, I wouldn't be honest if I didn't say that I was a very thrilled composer to come up with such an idea! (this is quite academic for myself! LOL).

But the point remains: It's a very strong 'movement' of a much bigger work, which doesn't follow that style at all! And as such it almost acts like a intermezzo. I chose to give that to Jeffrey for sight reading, exactly because I have had some doubts on how easy or difficult it is (and if you had my e-mail exchange with a few people you'd see that I always warn them for that part)... :-/ I *think* that I'm fully aware of the difficulty and the unidiomatic nature of that particular 2 and 1/2 pages (otherwise I wouldn't have posted it), as well as the functionality in the full work!

So much art is about taste. One can analogize with oral taste. Some pieces are light and sweet without too much substance but most people like them, especially the young (cotton candy, Twinkies).

Now as someone who is older and "experienced" I might consider good eating as a salad with red onion and blue cheese and a balsamic vinigrette, a bowl of really spicy chili, maybe after the meal a straight single malt scotch...followed by smoking a nice cigar!

These "tastes" would not appeal to a child, but they would to me!

I think so it goes with some contemporary music. For the advanced afficianato...unusual and stimulating, for many others it is just stinky cheese!

DO i know ? Well how many have I met that were into that sort of stuff, around 30 - 40 or so that had done a masters or beyond. Mostly people I met at schools as that sort stuff usually doesn't fly in the professional realm.

This isn't anything against modern music. The problem is that too many people don't really know what modern music is. And the stereotype I think you will find quite standard at any University that has a reputation. It is worse on the East coast. Not so bad in Europe.

Weird, how some of what you wrote appears to be part the quote from my post, and some of it doesn't.

Anyway, you are wrong about what you said - you nowhere stated that you were talking about talking about "the students or recently graduated composers". Obviously, I interpreted "academic composers" as being the ones on the faculty, which is the way I've heard that phrase used in the past.

MadForBrad brings up an interesting point about academic composers.

Composers who make a living as a faculty member of an academic institution are set apart from the rest by one simple fact:

They do not rely on an audience to make a living.

They don't need performances, publications, or recordings of their works to gain a following. Sure, they need to be "active" in their field to get tenure, but too often, this simply means calling in favors from one's friends or arranging performances at CMS conferences.

Composers who aren't academics have to reach out to performers and an audience to stay alive. In some cases, this can be done in a more accessible fashion - John Adams for example; but there are cases of the same happening among the avant-garde - think Meredith Monk or Stockhausen.

Of course, we should realize that it's unfair to assume a composer is an "academic" one just because they hold a teaching position. Kevin Putz, Jennifer Higdon and John Corigliano all hold teaching positions, but they all work very hard to reach out to an audience. (And it's probably not a coincidence that these people have jobs at Peabody, Curtis, and Juilliard.)

i think naturally the teachers will be somewhat more mature but the youngins have this complex. I think the teachers are somewhat responsible for pushing modern music on their students too soon when most of them can't even compose a classical styled sonata. I believe that composers should learn starting from the classical period and go thru all the periods including jazz rock and electronic music. Unfortunately, people seem to start at 1950 and they rarely look outside their field. That is the thing that surprises me the most as a composer. The one thing I crave more than anything is hearing things i am not used to. I suppose schools can't enforce this as you can't really have a class on each style as most programs offer 2 years of free composition which is always slanted to modern atonal stuff.

As MadForBrad said, he was talking about students and recent grads in the post I referenced, so he didn't really bring up the point in the way you credit him for. But anyway...

I don't understand the criticism of academic composers for being, guess what, "academic composers" and not for being something else that's somehow more populist or whatever it is you think they should be that they aren't. That's not part of the job description; in fact, being a composer is usually fairly secondary to what they are really doing, which typically is teaching composition courses. I don't think that there's a strong correlation between popular success as a composer and being a successful teacher. And there's also not necessarily any correlation between the teacher's compositional style and that of the students (e.g., Milton Babbitt taught Tobias Picker and Stephen Sondheim). So what's the problem? Just that they are "ivory tower" composers and not writing for a mass audience? I think universities traditionally have been supposed to be the proper venue for exactly that kind of rarefied and specialized activity.