MF: One of the tragedies of music education is that it doesn't produce composers. I turned down a very good job a year or two ago, because my idea of teaching just isn't what's happening in departments. I didn't want my students involved in performance groups, or in writing music for performance. [...] The trouble with music composition as taught in colleges is that what you're learning has only one word: analysis. You're given models, and the implication is that there's a secret to learn that will help you compose. That's the first tragic assumption.
Q: But haven't developments in music always taken place in response to previous developments? It would have been impossible for Beethoven to write as he did without knowing what had been done by Mozart and Haydn.
MF: I don't feel that Beethoven really emerged from Mozart and Haydn.
Q: Well, let's just say that he took forms from them; whatever he did was on the basis of forms which had been developed in the past.
MF: But forms are tricky things - there are so few of them in music. You sound much more realistic than me: of course, how could I have developed if I didn't have Webern and if I didn't have Varèse? But I never consciously used them as models.
Q: So what should music education be doing?
MF: I think it should just be for performers; I don't think composition should be taught. It's interesting that the four most influential composers in America today - myself, Earle and Cage, and Christian Wolff really because he's a classicist - had no connections and no training in music departments. So my attitude is: keep everything as human as possible, create a sense of proportion, good atmosphere to work, quietude, fantastic people there to help when they need them, and let them quietly get discouraged and get out of this tentative commitment they made; rather than creating some kind of Utopia.
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