Jay C. Batzner (b. 1974) is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida where he teaches music composition and technology courses as well as coordinates the composition program. In his first year, Jay received two prestigious grants: one to create collaborative works with visual artist Carla Poindexter and the second to initiate electroacoustic music concerts in Orlando. Prior to this position, Jay was an active adjunct professor at several colleges in the Kansas City area while he completed his D.M.A. in Composition at the University of Missouri – Kansas City Conservatory. While at UMKC, Jay received honors including a Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship and a Dean's Doctoral Scholar Fellowship.
Jay's music ranges from instrumental chamber works to electroacoustic compositions. He has participated in numerous national and international festivals including the Wellesley Composers Conference and the International Young Composers' Meeting in the Netherlands. His music is published by Unsafe Bull Music and has been recorded on the Capstone and Vox Novus labels. Jay is a frequent contributor to the new music website Sequenza21.com and a founding member of the composers organization The Collected.
Jay is a sci-fi geek, an amateur banjoist, a home brewer, and juggler.
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3/15/2006
Mark Your Calendars
I'm defending my dissertation on April 4.
I'm almost done with my committee's revisions. I've been thinking a lot about the nature of criticism. Should I be making these changes simply because my committee recommends them? I'm doing most of them since I believe they make the piece better. In the future, though, I don't know how often I'm going to change pieces based on other people's critical remarks. It will depend on the person making the comments, of course, and the scope of the comment.
This whole process is so artificial. When else in my life have/will a group of people question my compositional choices and have some kind of authoritarian approval over the work? The answer, I hope, is never. So, the question remains: why have this committee process? Any other committee that my music gets in front of will either accept or reject the piece based on matters that will, usually, have very little to do with the strength of the score.
I don't know what we should replace this committee process with. Sorry about ending a couple of sentences with prepositions. This is the internet, after all. If I was writing to Strong Bad, I'd be more careful.
posted by Jay C. Batzner
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