Composing Institutions and Institutionalising Composers: Value and Discipline in Contemporary English University Composition

Abstract

ACADEMICS IN the field of composition are under numerous pressures and influences. This thesis is based on extensive interviews with composer-academics and examines the field of university composition as the intersection of art worlds, an academic discipline, and an organisationally managed form or work. In-so-doing, it theorises the particular ways in which the field is formed, maintained, and reformed by social and organisational pressures. This particularly concerns the theorisation of conflict and looks at how contradictions between different pressures have the potential to change the practices of composer-academics.

Two key themes are placed at the centre of this theorisation: the value of authenticity and the discipline of rationalisation. The former attributes legitimacy to composers whose work is seen as autonomous and the latter extends the managerialism of the university organisation through the key rationalising technic of grammatisation. Throughout, these two ideas are in play, at every juncture setting up a tension between freedom and control.

The first part lays out the field by considering its composition and ways in which it may usefully be categorised. Part Two examines the practices of research (composing) and teaching and looks at how the university organisation interacts with these. With organisational rationalism taken as the constant, the ideal typical institutions laid out suggest an affinity for certain forms of experimental composition and a banking approach to teaching. The final part flips this, taking the ideal type of autonomy as the constant and theorising what a university that is not in conflict with this fundamental artistic (and academic) ideal could look like in the form of the ‘Liminal University’.