Back when I was an undergrad, I remember my heart sinking when I saw the cost of supposedly prestigious summer composition programs, but it's only as a teacher thinking about my students being asked to fork out four figures for one week of networking that I feel big mad about it

It is now my professional opinion that the industry of prestigious and expensive summer composition programs is a way of gate-keeping working class composers out of opportunities. Figure out ways to discount or comp by default.

N.B. We have scholarships available for composers at the National Puppetry Conference, which I am very glad about, but even undiscounted, it's not anywhere near as expensive as the flagship summer music programs.

Like am I seriously supposed to look my financially struggling students in the face (on Zoom) and say, "You should apply for this program, and if you get in, hey, GREAT NEWS: you or your parents have to come up with two thousand dollars!"

Hmmm why is the world of composition not particularly diverse hmmm what could be the reason hmm hmmm a mystery

Anyway, this has been yet another entry in my series of tweets on economic privilege in the arts

The arts is like one of those mobile games where you can make in-app purchases of extra lives and cheats and dominate the leaderboard https://twitter.com/mormolyke/status/1100461931574583298