Graduate Studies in Music
at the University of Pennsylvania
The Department of Music at the University of Pennsylvania offers A.M. and Ph.D. programs in four fields of study:
By design, the student body is small, generally numbering no more than 30-45 graduate students in the combined programs. Of these, however, fewer than half are actually taking courses in a given year. The faculty-student ratio is a most favorable one; small seminars and individual attention are very much the rule. Our curriculum provides rigorous preparation while incorporating flexibility to develop individual interests. Penn graduate students are able to avail themselves not only of the diversity of the faculty in music, but also of the richness of the larger university community through courses in other departments and interdisciplinary seminars on such topics as Early Modern Studies, Gender Studies, and Ethnohistory, to name just three of the many such seminars that are active on the campus. The programs in the history, theory, and anthropology of music are closely interconnected, reflecting the interdisciplinary focus of both the department and the larger community of humanistic scholars at Penn, but also focus on discipline-specific work. Students uncertain in which of these three areas they wish to concentrate may opt for one or the other as late as the end of their first year of study without delaying their progress toward the Ph.D. degree. The program in composition, with its legacy of pultizer prize winners, aims primarily to develop the student's compositional craft and knowledge of contemporary repertory.
At present, our faculty includes three composers, one theorist, two ethnomusicologists, and six musicologists. This distinguished group of scholars and composers has received numerous fellowships and awards, among them a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowships, NEH and NEA Fellowships, and book and article prizes from both the Society for Music Theory and the American Musicological Society. The Faculty has also been recognized for the excellence of its instruction and includes several award-winning teachers. In the last NRC ratings, the Penn department was named as one of the top ten graduate programs in music.
Penn graduates are also a distinguished group, presently teaching at universities and colleges that include Yale, Michigan, Haverford, Chicago, University of Texas, Pomona, and Northwestern. (See the listing of Penn PhDs.) Our placement records in recent years have been outstanding, even in the face of the difficult academic job market. Penn graduates include recipients of NEH and NEA fellowships, Guggenheim fellowships, ASCAP and BMI prizes, and a Pultizer Prize. Our graduate students regularly present papers at national and international meetings as well as in their own colloquia series and have been highly succesful in national fellowship competitions, including AMS 50, AAUW, and Javits fellowships. Graduate student composers have been the recipients of both BMI and ASCAP awards.
Financial assistance is available and we are almost always able to offer full funding to every student we admit. Each year, a number of our students receive fellowships that guarantee full support (i.e., full tuition, fees, health benefits and maximum stipend) for four or five years (subject, of course, to successful progress in the program).
Our contact information:
Director of Graduate Studies
Department of Music
University of Pennsylvania
3700 Market Street, Suite 300, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6313
Telephone: (215) 898-7544
FAX: (215) 573-2106
email: mmsmith@sas.upenn.edu
|
Undergraduate Studies
