Author Description

Dear Gary; Dear Eric is a journal of email exchanges between two brothers who are also university music professors and composers. Readers eavesdrop on the brothers' private dialogue providing an opportunity for observers to respond to no-holds barred, controversial and often quite personal conversations between them that share an unconditional passion for education and the arts. What they say is made valuable by their writing it to one another with sheer honesty and passionate idealism. This is a sincere attempt to exchange ideas that are at times provocative, freely indicting existing conditions, the prevalent imbalance between the business of and the art of everything - increasing the distance between, for example, healing and medicine, justice and law, spirituality and religion, learning and education - confusion between art and entertainment in Western culture, and misdirected processes. The manuscript is an exposé of problems commonly found on U.S. campuses that are well known to the professorate but rarely discussed publicly. Because the authors are both music professors, they focus on problems common to university music schools. What is written, however, defines concerns found among disciplines on any campus for the issues raised are systemic. The brothers describe how higher education has evolved over the past 30 years as the result of socio-economic pressures too powerful for the universities and colleges to resist. The authors delve deeply into how quality music is composed, how and what great music communicates. Faculty must restrict themselves and therefore their students to intensive engagements with humankind's best ideas, music, art and thought. There is much, however, about which the authors don't agree. Their heated debates on controversial topics invite readers to initiate thoughtful conversations about the questions raised. The book concludes with The Academy - a utopian educational institution that properly defines the qualities of those who teac