1. I am deeply grateful to Mark Katz, Nicholas Tochka, Andrea Bohlman, Mark Evan Bonds, Tim Carter, and Benjamin Piekut for providing feedback on earlier versions of this material, and to the anonymous readers of this Journal for their helpful comments. I also wish to thank the graduate students, faculty, and administrators at Duke University, as well as the members of yMusic, all of whom generously granted me their time and made this project possible.
2. Released on the Ben Folds Five album The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, “Army” reached position 17 on Billboard's “Modern Rock Tracks” chart in May 1999; see “Modern Rock Tracks,” Billboard, May 29, 1999, 89.
3. Babbitt, “Composer as Specialist,” 53.
4. The Duke residency took place between fall 2013 and spring 2015; the abovementioned rehearsal was held on the last day of the residency, which also marked the end of two years of fieldwork in which I observed yMusic's collaboration with Duke graduate students in composition, and conducted twenty-five interviews with students, faculty, administrators, and ensemble members. In addition to those cited in the notes below, these include interviews with the following: Gabriel Cabezas (April 23, 2015), Ben Daniels (February 11, 2015), Jamie Keesecker (February 11, 2015), Scott Lindroth (August 27, 2014), Andrea Lee (November 16, 2014), Owen S. Richardson (August 27, 2014), Vladimir Smirnov (February 11, 2015), Alex Sopp (November 18, 2014), John Supko (September 3, 2014), and Yahn Wagner (February 11, 2015). See also Robin, “Scene without a Name,” 178–245. As a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a PhD program located nearby, I participated in many activities with the Duke student composers including concerts, conferences, and informal gatherings. I consider them to be colleagues as well as research participants; that we were in similar career positions in similar fields offered me, I hope, additional insights into their circumstances. My relationship with yMusic extends further back. In February 2012 I wrote a feature article about the sextet for the New York Times, interviewing its performers as well as composers and songwriters with whom they had collaborated: William Robin, “Bridging Genres and Generations on the Fly,” New York Times, February 5, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/arts/music/ymusic-to-bring-its-versatility-to-ecstatic-music-festival.html.
5. I follow David Harvey's definition of neoliberalism as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade”: Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, 2. See also Blake, “Musicological Omnivory,” and Taylor, Music and Capitalism.