Must Reading: Paul Matthews' "The Cycle of Get"

Most composer-on-composer crime in the university happens in private meetings. These are personnel issues in which the participants are sworn to confidentiality. Sometimes these ethical bonds are so strong, it takes both gin and tonic to dissolve them. We’ve all heard the stories, spread with suspicious annotations like the fingerings in cheap editions of Mozart’s sonatas. But when these matters do not concern employment, public speculation and second-guessing is only inhibited by tact. And tact, it turns out, is a poor inhibitor.

This substantial article by Paul Matthews is filled with lots of entertaining puns and turns of phrase, but they clothe many really important statements about music and the musical life.