About the Department of Music at Columbia University

Dodge Hall, Home of the Dept of Music

The Mission and History of the Department of Music at Columbia University

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 around 1400 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.

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.

The First Century: A Brief History of the Department of Music at Columbia University

Edward MacDowell

The Department of Music at Columbia is one of the oldest and most distinguished at any American university. It was founded in 1896 by Edward MacDowell (1860-1908). Although MacDowell remained at Columbia for only eight years, his remarkable vision for the place of music in a liberal arts institution still influences us today, as we pursue a 21st century vision for music scholarship, performance, and education.
MacDowell saw a dual role for musical education at Columbia, and accordingly he divided the earliest courses into two groups: general musical culture and technical training. The legacy of the former group includes Music Humanities, part of Columbia’s Core Curriculum since the 1940’s (and still going strong), as well as the many courses in Western and non-Western repertories offered today for students from all disciplines.
The technical courses organized by MacDowell have their successors today in the rich undergraduate and graduate curricula in music history, music theory, ethnomusicology, and composition. Musical performance was also an important part of MacDowell’s original conception: he founded the Columbia University Orchestra in the year of his arrival, and it remains the oldest continuously operating orchestra in America.
 
Across the first half century MacDowell was succeeded as head of the Department by such educators as Daniel Gregory Mason and Douglas Moore. Graduate instruction focussed initially on musical composition, which for the quarter century after World War II was taught principally by Otto Luening. In the 1930’s, Paul Henry Lang was brought to Columbia to start a Ph.D. program in historical musicology, one of the first in the country. With the arrival of William Mitchell in 1941, Columbia established itself as a leading research center in music theory. In the 1950’s, Willard Rhodes, who worked with the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs, became the first professor of ethnomusicology.
A small sampling of other notable events or personages of this period at Columbia might include: the presence of Béla Bartók doing pioneering work on Eastern European folk music; the founding of the earliest active center for electronic music in the United States; the establishment of a workshop that premiered many American operas; and the creation of the nation’s first (and still the most prestigious) musicology journal edited and published by graduate students.
 
Entering its next century, the Music Department maintains and has even expanded its disciplinary depth and diversity. In a recent survey of graduate programs in music in the U.S., Columbia’s was one of only a dozen rated “distinguished.” Graduate applications have more than doubled in six years. Our faculty and students continue to win the most coveted fellowships and awards, from such agencies or organizations as the Guggenheim Foundation, Fulbright, the NEA, the NSF, the Social Science Research Council, the NEH, ASCAP, and the American Academy in Rome, among many others.
The number of undergraduates majoring in music at Columbia has grown sevenfold over the past decade. Music Humanities continues to attract nearly 700 students every semester. The University Orchestra has toured to great acclaim. Each year the Department’s Music Performance Program enables hundreds of students to receive academic credit for lessons and chamber ensembles, including jazz; their teachers are among the best musicians in New York. Columbia has also broadened musical opportunities for its students through an innovative exchange program with the Juilliard School; qualified students at either institution can enroll for courses or lessons for credit at the other.
These are just some of the ways in which Music at Columbia thrives today.