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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?

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?

Why do you feel you should bring your partner along to begin with? That does seem a little bit strange to me, and I'm not surprised by the university's response. It is very strange that the grad student wrote to you though... I don't know what to think of that, but it could either be that the department is being too harsh or that particular student has a chip on their shoulder.

People fail in every industry. Because of their Ph.Ds, academics tend to think too highly of themselves to acknowledge their own responsibilities in their professional shortcomings. They would rather blame the "system" than themselves.... they blame the people that didn't "tell them" it was so difficult... oooooh woe! if only they had known, they would have gone and become ceo of a fortune 500 company instead of studying English lit! Take responsibility for your own actions and stop crying like a baby. Get a job, even if it's not your dream job, and work your ass off despite it not being your ideal job.

I agree with LadyL - you probably won't want to emphasize the location too much and give the impression that you're more interested in moving to X region than attending their school, but you could certainly mention things like family close by, regional opportunities or resources in your specific field, cost of living etc. I wouldn't mention things like weather and quality of life, although these are factors many of us take into account, the interviewers will not really care about how these things play into your decision. In my case location is very important, as a musician I want to be near a major city because of the academic, cultural and professional resources that big cities have compared to small towns. There might be something similar in your field you could also mention

Chewed Food

I've been wondering the same thing. I only have a BA, and I applied to a mix of ma/phd programs and to one masters program. None of my top choices offer a terminal masters degree (which is usually the norm for music composition- you can't really do anything with just a masters), so I applied to the full ma/phd track for those. Then, just in case I got rejected from all of them, I applied to a less competitive university for just a masters. I felt that this school would be easier to get into, and I would be able to go on my merry way after two years without burning any bridges. Then the plan would have been to re-apply to the more competitive phd programs with a masters under my belt. Not sure if this was terribly sound logic, but it worked out.

Good luck Bryan! Would you be willing to share some music from your portfolio with us? I'm always curious to get a taste for other applicants' compositions (it usually just makes me even more anxious, but it's still fun)

You just gotta keep busy and keep your mind occupied - I try to get out as often as possible (to get away from the computer), and when I'm home I play a lot of guitar.... almost too much. My fingertips are killing me, but it eases the mental anxiety

They sent me an email on March 3 notifying me that I was placed on the wait list, and sent the rejection email on April 6. In case anyone else is curious, I also got rejection emails last year from NYU on March 23, and from Princeton on February 23.

Sorry about northwestern, soclose. And good luck with Duke Timothy! I was wait-listed at Duke last year, but didn't make the cut. Hopefully it'll work out better for you