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 Musicology specialization at New York University is one of the three areas of study in the department - alongside Ethnomusicology, and Composition and Theory. We do not regard these areas as mutually exclusive, but rather expect all students in any one to explore the concepts and course offerings of the other two. This seems particularly important for students in musicology, for this field is in the process of a major creative cycle, rethinking its premises and processes. This has come about largely as a result of the strong influence of the ideas and practices of the other fields: all three are now increasingly concerned with sociological issues, the place of cultural policy, or relationships between composers, performers and public -- in the past as much as in the present. New thinking in all of these areas is now influencing historians of music in very fruitful ways.
Musicological study in this department therefore involves not only training in the traditional skills, of source study, archival or bibliographical research, institutional history, or performance practice (among others): it also requires consideration of more recent concerns -- among them gender and music, critical theory, perception and reception, or concepts of authenticity, of embodiment, and of cultural interaction. Students are encouraged to take at least one course offered for each of the other areas of study, and are encouraged to maintain contacts with all of the faculty of the department, through courses or independent study. Many students also take courses in other departments or in the Consortium of local colleges - among them CUNY, Columbia University, and the New School University. By this means, students have the opportunity to learn from specialist scholars in different fields, to grapple with a wide range of concepts and issues, and then to apply the results in their own research and publications.
