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Congrats, Timothy! I'm off to UC Davis, pretty damn excited about it.

Really? I was looking at the Adobe suites and they seem pretty decent. Would you suggest avoiding tandem properties? Thanks!

Hey People! I'm headed to Davis for an ma/phd in music composition. Congrats to all who are going! Anyone have any luck finding housing so far?

Congrats Jason! Just an update, I spoke to my guy at Columbia yesterday and found out I was rejected - 130 applicants and 3 acceptances, and an extraordinarily competitive pool this year. It's been a good run - I'd be curious to hear where (if anywhere) everyone will be going? I'm likely headed to UC Davis. Good luck to all!

Congrats, composer. Just curious, when did you hear from UCSD? I haven't heard a peep from them and am anxiously awaiting their reply

Why does the department "despise" you? People don't despise people for no reason at all- either you're misinterpreting or you did something to cause tension. If you do have a shaky relationship with them, you definitely don't want to study there for grad school, where any underlying problems will more than likely be exasperated. You should look other places as well, not just your alma mater.

Nothing yet. A week in the mail seems like a suspiciously long time- makes me think they didn't send the out when they say they did.

Welcome Jason and Whistler, and congrats on your progress so far. Thanks for the info on Harvard, musico.... this should be a pretty exciting week, although I'm anticipating a nice solid rejection from them. Whistler, it seems like you've got a much heftier academic background than many people applying, but I'm not sure if two masters degrees are that much of an asset or not. I've got the impression that 90% of the application is the portfolio and 10% everything else (undergrad and masters degrees, GRE's, LOR's, SOP's, writing samples etc.). So when I got rejected last year I focused almost all of my time on composing and listening (aaah, listening... the often overlooked and underestimated younger brother of composing). I bought a ton of cd's of the professors I was interested in and listened to them constantly, and I think that helped me really weed out the ones I wasn't 100% passionate about, and it also influenced my compositions for the better. It's defintely expensive, but no more expensive than this whole ridiculous application process, and I'll have this music for the rest of my life (hopefully!). So... yeah, if anyone ends up getting rejected across the board and wants to try again, I guess I would highly recommend listening to a LOT of different music written by the composers you want to work with. That's perhaps what has made the biggest difference for me personally. [/my two cents]

I agree, you should be honest about which other schools you applied to. I think an ambiguous answer is kinda shady, that gives them the chance to speculate for better or for worse.

Another rejection from Berkeley here - pretty bummed out, it was one of my top choices and I felt it was a perfect fit. Oh well.. c'est la vie, mon ami. 2 acceptances and 2 rejections so far.. we'll see how the rest pan out. Good luck to all!

Best of luck to you John!

That would be quite a feat if you could write something like that! I think the issue with that kind of deep analysis is that it's highly subjective, you get theorists arguing for and against the same thing, a lot of times based on intuition or how they personally hear/perceive X harmony or note in a context. The same note or harmony can often be correctly analyzed in many different ways. The difficulty would be setting up the program so it doesn't simply do a surface analysis, in which case totally random superficial similarities between disparate works could be misinterpreted as some kind of fundamental similarity between them. Schenkerian analysis is the traditional "deep structure" analysis that tonal (and I guess even some post-tonal) analysts use to determine very broad underlying structure of works... that could be something you include in the program to analyze tonal content and direction of a work's form.

I don't know too much about tonal analysis software - I remember hearing about programs that analyze large amounts of certain highly stylized kinds of music (Bach Chorales, for example), I believe they then extrapolate algorithms from these analyses and use them as a way to automatically "compose" in the style. I've been trying to remember some of the people/programs but can't really recall. This is a well-known sound analysis program that a Columbia grad student developed some time ago... that's more the kind of thing they're doing over there and in Stanford, I think.

The only one I know well is Columbia university - they're big on spectral analysis of sound. I think Stanford is also really good, and maybe Princeton (at least, princeton used to be... not sure what the deal is nowadays). Edit: I think if you're talking about tonal analysis of music (ie: what humans can do) then it is a pretty outdated thing, but in terms of analyzing sound and acoustics, there's a lot going on at Columbia and it's still quite cutting edge, imho.

McGill rejection was mine - not a word from the other programs yet, but I'm still optimistic (although slightly less than before). Anyone hear anything from Columbia or Berkeley yet?