A teacher once said: “Writing music is easy; composing art is hard.”

The problem with the LAO guide is that it destroys meritocracy in the orchestral repertoire, and places a heavy burden on artistic organizations to choose diversity over compositional merit.

Music in the academy is at risk. The decline in its status, presence, and reach can be traced to the cultural shifts beginning in the 1960s. Western classical music—with its unassailable history of accomplishment and undeniable pedagogical, cultural, and spi...

This disc takes the title of its biggest and most prominent work, but it also includes three others: “Evening Prayer,” “Ground 0,” and “Notes on a Southern Sky.” Those first three are all for orchestra, written in the last ten years, while the last...