The Music Department is committed to placing music at the center of the liberal arts experience as an integration of musical practice with scholarship. The curriculum is built around five core ways of knowing music: through performance, creation, analysis, ethnography, and history. The department provides a path for students of any level of musical experience (or none at all) to pursue high-level work as music majors in one or more of these areas. The department further aims for all students to find each of these ways of knowing available to them for study, and for music majors to gain experience in each area.

The Department of Music gives students the opportunity to study music from cultural, historical, theoretical, psychological, creative, and interpretive perspectives, including study of Western and non-Western classical, popular, and experimental musical traditions.

The Department of Musicology and Ethnomusicology offers the MA and PhD in Musicology, Ethnomusicology, and Musicology and Ethnomusicology. Our department dedicates itself to interdisciplinary, disciplinary, historical, translational, analytical, and cross-cultural thinking. The faculty in the Department consists of a cohort of five musicologists and five ethnomusicologists, and houses research centers in Early Music and Beethoven studies.

The Brandeis Department of Music offers you the opportunity to experience music as both scholarship and a process of creation and performance. At Brandeis, we help our students to awaken their creative identity.

Founded by preeminent American composer Irving Fine, our department features a distinguished faculty of world-renowned composers, award-winning authors and scholars, instrumentalists, vocalists and conductors. We offer a broad-based undergraduate major and minor that combine the study of history, theory, composition and performance. Our nationally acclaimed graduate programs focus specifically on composition and theory and musicology.

Brown’s Ph.D. program in Musicology and Ethnomusicology allows students to study music of any kind from several perspectives, within a richly interdisciplinary environment. Students begin learning about the methods and materials of music studies with core seminars in ethnomusicology and historiography, while creating individually tailored programs of further study that suit their scholarly and professional needs.

In the music department, students work closely with professors—internationally recognized theorists, composers, performers, and musicologists—to investigate music in global, historical, and theoretical contexts. Courses encourage creative and critical thinking and emphasize music as an art form as well as a rigorous discipline. Students are exposed to music from a wide variety of past and present world cultures and can select courses in music history and theory, musicianship, performance, conducting, composition, world music, jazz history, American popular music, and African drumming.

The collaborative major in music and computation includes music and computer science courses allowing for focused study in computer-generated music and consideration of how it has shaped musical taste and culture.

Undergraduate: Flexible rigor is the guiding philosophy behind Dartmouth Music's newly redesigned Major, Modified Major, and Minor in Music, each of which functions on an open course countmodel. This framework centers student agency, maximizes curricular flexibility, and offers pathways as vibrant and varied as the students we serve.

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M.F.A. in Sonic Practice: Dartmouth's M.F.A. in Sonic Practice is a 3-year, fully-funded graduate program for composers, artists, and scholars working expansively with sound. 

Ethnomusicology at Harvard offers intensive training in ethnographic method as well as study of theories, problems, and approaches relevant to the study of any living musical tradition in its cultural setting. The Harvard program has particular strengths in regions stretching from the Mediterranean to India, in Africa and African diasporas, and in urban America.

The Department of Music provides a creative environment for the study and performance of music with a global perspective, and encourages students to develop skills, expand knowledge, and contribute actively to society as artists and citizens.

We offer a diverse curriculum that engages students in historical and cultural study, as well as analysis, creation, and performance of music.

Our emphasis on global perspective and experiential learning provides opportunities for each student to explore and develop their own musical passions, and to collaborate with peers and faculty in many ways, including through interdisciplinary work, ensemble participation, and independent projects.

The Department of Music at College of Arts, Media and Design inspires creative growth through intellectual discovery and innovation, transdisciplinary education and collaboration, and academic and experiential learning programs that prepare students for the music profession—and the world—that they will encounter after graduation.

The department's current faculty specializations include music and culture from West Africa, North Africa, the Arab world, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, North India, Japan, and Jewish traditions. The department's performance courses use authentic musical instruments from these regions. Learn more about the Ethnomusicology faculty: Barry Drummond, Rich Jankowsky, Stéphanie Khoury, David Locke, Michael McLaughlin, Attah Poku, Layth Sidiq, Jeffrey Summit, Warren Senders, and Cathleen Read. Learn more about our Instrument Collection.

The Music Department is based on the premise that all the world’s musics warrant close study. This is reflected in the cultural diversity of the Department’s faculty and the range of courses in music history, culture, composition and theory they offer. In addition, the department recognizes that the study of music necessarily involves the practice of music making. To this end, the Department has a particularly active performance program which provides private instrumental and vocal instruction opportunities and ensemble courses in a wide variety of traditions and approaches. Finally, the department sees the ability to engage with unfamiliar musical traditions as an essential aspect of 21st century musicianship. To this end inter-cultural references are woven into many of the Department’s History and Culture, Theory and Composition courses and Performance courses are offered in musics from across the world.  In addition, the Department’s graduate program attracts an internationally and musically diverse collection musicians and scholars who contribute to this intercultural engagement both formally as teaching assistants and informally as fellow musicians. In these varied ways the Music Department seeks to create an exceptional artistic and educational environment where students can develop their existing musical commitments while also expanding their awareness of the full range of the world’s musics.

The Department of Music is the home of scholars and students who continue a tradition of study stretching back to the ancient world. One of the seven original liberal arts, music maintains a place in the university as a subject of broad and passionate interest to composers, historians, ethnomusicologists, performers, and theorists. At Yale, all of these form a community dedicated to furthering a knowledge and love of music. Using the abundant musical resources at Yale—which include graduate professional schools of Music, Art, and Drama, an Institute for Sacred Music, a renowned collection of historical instruments, and an exceptionally large library of scores, recordings, books, and original manuscripts—the Department of Music provides an extraordinarily rich musical environment unmatched by any other college or university.