About the Department

Our Mission

As we enter our second century, the Department's mission is to support and profess scholarly and scientific inquiry into music, and equally the creative activity of music composition, at the highest levels of rigor and innovation, for both graduate and undergraduate students, specialists and non-specialists in music, and a diverse constituency that spans both across and beyond Columbia University. While we do not offer any degrees in music performance, we also provide a high quality performance offering to a wide range of student musicians, integrated with our academic curriculum.

As a liberal arts department, and not a conservatory, we aim to prepare our undergraduate majors, minors, and concentrators for careers in music and the arts, but also to bring skills developed in the rigorous study of music to the pursuit of careers in academia, technology, public service, policy, business, medicine, the law, engineering, science, education, and many other fields. We believe that the study of music is crucial to the development of the critical intellectual and ethical skills that are the broader objectives of a liberal arts education and the basis for a successful career in any field.

Beyond our direct affiliates, we impart to many hundreds more each year a rigorous and diverse representation of and engagement in music as a subject of humanistic and scientific research, aesthetic appreciation, cultural discovery, and skillful creative work. Our required course in Columbia College’s Core Curriculum ("Masterpieces of Western Music," colloquially known as “Music Humanities”) annually helps more than 1600 Columbia students to develop critical conceptual tools and listening skills for understanding Western music in cultural and historical as well as aesthetic context, and our two Global Core courses in Asian Music offer a similar perspective on the musics of South, East, West, and Central Asia. Our Music Performance Program serves hundreds of students -- most not otherwise affiliated with the Department -- with lessons and ensembles in classical, jazz, popular, and non-Western musics.

We prepare graduate students, with notable success over many decades, to enter the academic profession as music theorists, historians, critics, ethnographers, technologists, and composers, and to make major contributions to the advancement of music as a subject of scholarship and as an art. Our graduate alumni are on faculties of music all over the world, and are well represented among the faculties of our peer departments.

Finally, the Department and its affiliated Centers support many scholarly events and performances for the Columbia and New York communities, whose diverse and rich musical legacies are represented across the full range of our commitments, and we collaborate with many other centers, institutes, schools, and departments at Columbia and with institutions, artists, students and scholars in our New York community and around the world.