At 01:31 PM 1/16/00 -0600, Steven Schwartz wrote:
>Walter Meyer asks:
>
>>As a non-composer and a non-musician, I'd like to ask whether any well
>>known composer (let's leave "greatness" out of this!) can be said to have
>>been a better composer for having studied at a conservatory or similar
>>institution?
>
>I think a better question to ask is whether they would have become
>competent classical-music composers without some sort of training.

 [An instructive list of several composers' examples follow.]

Since one suggestion (among others) for female composers, w/ some
notable exceptions, achieving recognition of their abilities was that
conservatories had been traditionally closed to them, I asked about the
importance of institutionalized instruction.  (While I believe most modern
composers that I've heard of have attended conservatories, I don't think
that answers my question.)

Steve cites the example of the inspiration and/or insight Copland
acquired from Nadia Boulanger, to whom he almost had to be dragged.  (I'm
surprised he didn't remark on the irony of such instruction coming from a
woman, in a thread about the disadvantages encountered by women who might
want to establish themselves as composers!) But I don't believe Nadia
Boulanger was the same as a conservatory or any other institution.  She was
Nadia Boulanger and people who studied with her almost all seemed to emerge
the better musicians for it.  I suspect there have been other instructors,
male and female, who could and did assert similar inspiration upon their
pupils.  And as composers they may even be considered by many their pupils'
inferiors.  Vide, Beethoven's teachers, after he broke up with Haydn.  I'm
not so sure access to such people was denied to women even if admission to
the famous Institutes may have been.  And I'm not so sure exclusion from
such institutes would have been a disadvantage.  After all, and I ask this
with tongue only partly in cheek, wasn't Thomas Quasthof denied admission
to a musical Hochschule because he couldn't play the piano?

Walter Meyer