Master of Arts in Music (Critical Music Studies)

The MA Program typically takes two years to complete, and students in this program have the option of applying to the PhD program. The PhD program is designed to take five to six years. Students usually spend the first two years completing Masters-level coursework in preparation for qualifying exams, taken at the end of the second year. In the third and fourth year, students work with a steering committee to focus their interests, hone their research skills, and develop their dissertation project. The final two years are spent completing the dissertation. The program in Critical Music Studies (CMS) presents a multidisciplinary approach to the study of music and sound, in history and in the present. Formerly History-Theory-Ethnomusicology, CMS offers a broad approach to the critical and humanistic understanding of how music is created, practiced, and consumed in different times and places. Our faculty and students routinely cross disciplinary boundaries, for example writing dissertations that combine ethnography and archival research. This kind of intellectual ambition is reflected in our curriculum, which allows students to break out of rigid disciplinary pathways and explore other methods. The renamed and redesigned program is responsive, on one hand, to the ways that contemporary scholarship is increasingly defined by interdisciplinary projects (in particular, our teaching and research engages perspectives from sound studies, critical race theory, performance studies, and queer theory). On the other hand, CMS endeavors to guide academic discourse that is dynamically attuned to the world in which we live by incubating scholarship that speaks to the diversity of experiences and perspectives that exist throughout the globe.