Well, this is great. A quick search reveals that just about everyone coming out of Temple’s music program is writing atonal, or at best weakly tonal, music, which explains a lot of the pressure I’ve encountered (and resisted) to abandon the concepts of tonality. If I can’t write tonal music, I don’t want to write music at all.

Again, I am getting the feeling that I simply don’t belong in this school. I can’t study algorithms, I can’t study mathematics, and I can’t study tonal music composition. Of course, I could have studied all three at any of the schools I didn’t get into. Unfortunately, apparently only the ivies recognize the value of timeless instruction (more likely they just have enough prestige to get funding in even fields that are not “hot” at the moment). Everyone else just seems to want to chase after fads. The only consolation is that I am interested in biology as well, which is something I can study here for once.

Monmouth opened up possibilities, but all Temple has done is close them thus far.