Message from the Chair

Welcome to the pages of the Music Department at the University of Chicago! Whether you’re considering applying to a program, browsing for interesting talks or concerts, wondering about curricular requirements, or looking for opportunities to play music, these pages will help you find answers. All of us, faculty and students, strive to continually renew the traditions of original scholarship and composition that have characterized the Department for many years, and to complement these with performance.

The Department of Music offers graduate degrees in Composition, Ethnomusicology, and Music History and Theory and an undergraduate Bachelor of Arts degree in Music. Graduates of the Department do remarkable work throughout the world. They occupy professorships at such institutions as Berkeley, Cambridge, the University of Michigan, the Eastman School of Music, Johns Hopkins University, and Indiana University and post-docs in London, Toronto, New York and Berlin; and work in such diverse fields as academia, music publishing and editing, arts management, consulting, librarianship, urban education, and academic administration.

Beyond the classroom, the Music Department hosts a thriving performance program encompassing four choirs, two orchestras, two jazz ensembles, a middle east music ensemble, a gamelan, an early music ensemble, a large wind ensemble, and programs in chamber music, piano and voice. The Department also has in residence several professional groups, including Contempo (formerly the Contemporary Chamber Players), now in its 47th season, plus three ensembles-in-residence, which contribute variously to undergraduate and graduate student life and study: the Pacifica Quartet; the new music ensemble eighth blackbird; and the early music ensemble The Newberry Consort. All these activities work together to form cornerstones of cultural life at the University.

Martha Feldman
Department Chair