PhD in Composition
Conductor Julien Leroy rehearsing Ensemble Court-Circuit members, flutist Jérémie Fèvre, clarinetist Pierre Dutrieu, violinist Alexandra Greffin-Klein, violist David Rose, violoncellist Ingrid Schoenlaub, and percussionist Eve Payeur at June in Buffalo 2014
What does it mean to study music composition today? At the University at Buffalo Department of Music we embrace a multitude of practices ranging from instrumental and orchestral composition to electronic music, mixed media and opera. These practices are developed in combination with interdisciplinary research, analysis, and cooperative learning. Composing is supported through innovative seminars, lessons, and workshops alongside many of the highest-level performers, composers, and academics in contemporary music.
To contest the idea of music is perhaps a composer’s greatest task today. Throughout history, the struggle in composition has been to challenge our capacity for listening. In this light, composing means reinventing music with the possibility to feel again and rediscover the potential of what it is to be human.
Background
Drawing upon its rich history as a center for new and experimental music, the creative work of UB's music composition program is a focal point of Department of Music activity. The performance of new music is supported by a highly accomplished faculty and advanced by UB's Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music which sponsors the annual June in Buffalo festival as well as activities throughout the academic year. The program has a focus on experimentation, which includes exploring extended techniques on traditional instruments, electronic music, expanded musical notations, and speculative formal constructions.
Course of Study
Just as openness is a defining feature of the composition program, so too is its complement, rigor. The ability to question oneself, as well as others, and to put at risk one’s deepest held beliefs about music is tested through exciting opportunities to compose new music in various contexts. Of equal value is developing the skill to articulate one’s ideas about music through seminar presentations, written texts, and research as an essential aspect of the compositional process.
Compositional aesthetics as well as contemporary musicological and theoretical studies form a major part of the program, manifesting in such seminar themes as materialism, noise, posthumanism, Queer Music studies, popular music, and music and gender, in combination with the analysis of tonal and post–tonal new music. In individual lessons, there is a focus on musical ideas, materials, structures, and processes and their realization through compositional craft.
In all cases, a student's individual course of study is determined through discussion with their major advisor and the Director of Graduate Studies.
Graduate Programs
UB offers a five-year PhD in Music Composition as well as a two year MA in Music Composition. These graduate programs are open to composers who have developed their musical thinking through diverse backgrounds and experiences.
