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Cornell's Doctor of Musical Arts program in composition is highly selective, in part because all doctoral students are admitted with four full years of funding. There are normally eight doctoral composers in residence; with such a small program, the camaraderie and collaboration among doctoral composers, and between them and candidates in musicology and performance practice, is crucial. Composition is taught by a combination of private lessons and group seminars, in a close, collegial relationship with the faculty. The emphasis is on each student's developing his or her personal approach as an artist, even while attaining the highest possible technical mastery, and the composers in the program usually represent a wide range of styles.
The Composers' Forum brings distinguished guest composers to the campus several times a year. The Cornell Contemporary Chamber Players, student managed, present the works of doctoral composers, typically three times a year; the Festival Chamber Orchestra (a professional group of fourteen players, modeled on the London Sinfonietta) presents an annual concert of doctoral candidates' chamber-orchestra scores. In addition, Ensemble X, a professional new-music ensemble based at Cornell, presents an annual concert series of works by leading contemporary composers, including those of faculty members.
Although the D.M.A. is normally viewed as a professional degree, not a scholarly one, at Cornell our approach blends scholarship with artistic work. Like some Ph.D. programs, we require a foreign language and a thesis dealing with a historical or theoretical topic (not with the candidate's own music), and we expect that all composers will do some seminar work in academic subjects. A principal strength of the program is that, like all Cornell doctorates in the humanities, the D.M.A. program in composition offers the adventurous student the opportunity to study many subjects, including topics outside the field of music, and to meld these into a highly individual course of study.
Composers' dissertations in recent years have dealt with a wide range of subjects. Some write about the work of current composers; recently, for example, Harrison Birtwistle, Elliott Carter, Cecil Taylor, Jacob Druckman, John Harbison, Witold Lutoslawski, and Judith Weir. Some composers write about early twentieth-century topics, such as proportional relations in neoclassic Stravinsky, form and tonality in Carl Nielsen, the influence of James P. Johnson on Thelonius Monk, or the influence of the gamelan on Messiaen's Turangalila Symphonie. Still others might write about such subjects as music perception, computer applications in music, or broader topics such as musique spectrale.
Students who do not already have a master's degree in music earn the Master of Fine Arts in the course of their study; but the M.F.A. is not normally viewed as a terminal degree at Cornell, and those wishing to earn only the master's degree are not usually admitted.