New York University Graduate School of Arts and Science 0 courses 72 total credits
The NYU Graduate Program in Music is designed for the professionally minded student who plans a career combining college-level teaching with continuing research and/or composition. We feature three degree tracks: Ethnomusicology, Historical Musicology, and Composition and Theory, but student research and interests are not expected to conform to narrow interpretations of these tracks. Indeed, our students work on a wide variety of topics including jazz, popular music, film music, world musical traditions, western art music, and musical theater. Recent graduates hold academic appointments in some of the most prestigious universities in the United States and Canada, and are making distinguished contributions to scholarship and musical composition on both the national and international levels. The Graduate Program in Music is deliberately small, admitting six to eight students each year. The curriculum is research oriented; most courses are concerned with extending the boundaries of current knowledge. The Music Department offers a dual degree with the NYU School of Law: Music PhD/Law JD. Additional Program RequirementsLanguage ExaminationsComprehensive ExaminationDissertation Proposal, and Advancement to CandidacyDissertation DefenseDepartmental Approval The program requires the completion of 72 credits, and offers three specializations: Historical Musicology, Ethnomusicology, and Composition and Theory. See Doctor of Philosophy in Music for specialization details. Students must demonstrate reading competency in one modern language by passing a written examination administered by the department before taking the comprehensive examination. Between the comprehensive examination and the dissertation proposal defense, students must demonstrate reading knowledge in a second language (students in composition are exempted from this requirement). Students are expected to select a second language appropriate to their research topic. Ordinarily, students will have passed the second language examination by no later than the third year of study. No student in musicology or ethnomusicology may advance to candidacy without having passed the second language exam. The comprehensive examination tests the student’s knowledge of all major aspects of the field. Students are expected to display sophisticated skills in dealing with intellectual problems and should be able to create and support thoughtful lines of argument from a wide range of evidence. Those specializing in historical musicology should demonstrate a thorough general knowledge of Western musical history, of Western music’s changing styles, and of current issues in the discipline. Students are expected to cite and discuss recent musicological writing and to advance and support coherent arguments about major issues in response to the questions posed on the examination. Those specializing in ethnomusicology should demonstrate an understanding of the history of the discipline, its theories and principal ethnographies, and major musical cultures. Students specializing in composition and theory are expected to be familiar with the principal composers and compositional models of the last century and to be able to handle problems of practical analysis. Whatever their field of specialization, students are also expected to have a basic knowledge of the other fields of music scholarship and to incorporate this knowledge into their examination responses. Preparation for the examination should therefore include independent study of both repertoire (with extensive listening and analysis as appropriate) and scholarly writing about music. During the third or fourth year of study, students should select a principal adviser for the dissertation and, in consultation with their adviser, should select two other faculty to form a dissertation committee. One member of the committee may come from outside the department, or, more rarely, from outside the University. Students should develop a dissertation project in close consultation with the committee they have chosen. Ordinarily, this work should be sufficiently developed to allow students to defend their dissertation proposal by sometime in their fourth year of study. Students develop a dissertation proposal in consultation with their committee and present it to that committee during their oral examination. Lasting from one to two hours, this examination will probe the student’s competence in the planned field of research, in related fields, and in current methodological and theoretical approaches to the dissertation topic. Students should expect that the committee may require substantial revisions of their proposal and/or additional work. Students who pass this oral examination on their dissertation proposal will be approved to begin work immediately on the dissertation. the methods to be used (e.g., approaches to fieldwork, analytical techniques, theoretical framework); For students specializing in composition, the dissertation will be one or more compositions of significant proportions accompanied by a thesis. In their dissertation proposal, composers must include a brief description of the intended composition(s), and they should discuss scoring, any texts to be set, and the planned structure and size. Additionally, they should discuss the thesis as described above.
The New York University catalog does not list a course sequence for this program.
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