The NYU Graduate Program in Music is designed for the professionally minded student who plans a career combining college-level teaching with continuing research and/or composition. We feature three degree tracks: Ethnomusicology, Historical Musicology, and Composition and Theory, but student research and interests are not expected to conform to narrow interpretations of these tracks. Indeed, our students work on a wide variety of topics including jazz, popular music, film music, world musical traditions, western art music, and musical theater. Recent graduates hold academic appointments in some of the most prestigious universities in the United States and Canada, and are making distinguished contributions to scholarship and musical composition on both the national and international levels.
The Graduate Program in Music is deliberately small, admitting six to eight students each year. The curriculum is research oriented, most courses are concerned with extending the boundaries of current knowledge.
The ethnomusicology specialization at NYU emphasizes critical and experimental approaches to the study of sound, music, and listening. While this area assigns central importance to ethnography, we are resolutely interdisciplinary, incorporating methodologies and theoretical orientations from fields throughout the humanities and social sciences. Ethnomusicologists at NYU engage with a wide variety of issues--some of long-standing concern to the discipline , others with less conventional pedigrees that emerge from sound studies, psychoacoustics, trauma studies, science and technology studies, and other hybrid fields. Our commitment to new and flexible avenues of inquiry grows out of our shared interest in producing analyses that combine close attention to sonic detail with heightened awareness of the ways that people make, disseminate and interpret music. In their first semester, ethnomusicology students join the other students in their cohort in two proseminars that expose them to durable approaches and provocative new works in music and sound studies. The final component of the core curriculum for ethnomusicology students is an intensive seminar in ethnographic methodologies. Here and throughout their studies in the Department, students hone their research skills within the complex environment of New York City, grappling with the production and circulation of local knowledges in densely populated areas shot through with transnational flows and disjunctures. (We also encourage ethnomusicology students to take at least one semester of the Department's composition seminar, as composition and performance are important methodologies for exploring the sonorous world.)
