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 the June in Buffalo festival.
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 which includes an awareness of the rules and normative practices that often guide our understanding of music’s effects. In this light, composing means reinventing music to enrich our listening abilities so that music’s possibilities can exceed any prefigured understanding of what music is or should be.
At the University at Buffalo Department of Music, we embrace an open attitude toward composition and provide the needed space for students to think critically and experimentally in a variety of ways. The focus of the composition program includes experimentation with sound and instrumental techniques, new forms of notation, speculative compositional structures and processes, new technologies, and interdisciplinary connections with other arts such as poetry, literature, film, painting and the visual arts. These practices are developed in combination with interdisciplinary research, analysis, and compositional opportunities, and supported through innovative seminars, lessons, and workshops alongside many of the highest-level performers, composers, and academics in contemporary music.
Compositional opportunities include performances with the Slee Sinfonietta, UB Symphony Orchestra, UB Choir, as well as many prominent new music ensembles active in the American and European scenes. Each student is given prominent opportunities to compose new works each year, including performances of their compositions in Slee Hall or other performance venues.
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.
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 prior 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 new materialism, noise and listening, posthumanism, music and gender, serialism and mathematical applications, and the analysis of contemporary new music. In individual lessons, there is a focus on musical ideas, materials, structures, and processes and their realization through compositional craft.
Course of Study
Please visit the Graduate Degree & Course Catalog to view the approved normal course of study for students pursuing a PhD in Composition. In all cases, a student’s particular program should be determined in consultation with his/her academic advisor. Each student choses an advisor from the compositional faculty with whom they have weekly one-hour composition lessons. A student can study with different advisors during their first three years but must, by the end of the third year, choose their advisor for the qualifying exams and dissertation committee. Customized tracks, involving substitutions for required and elective courses, are encouraged. These must be planned with the advisor and will require the approval of the Music Department Graduate Committee.
A student in their fourth year is expected to prepare for their qualifying examination to proceed to the dissertation in their fifth year. The qualification exam is in three parts: analysis of contemporary music and two areas that reflect a student’s interests and influences. The resulting qualifying portfolio consists of three papers (music analysis paper and two papers on topics developed with their qualifying committee members) and three compositions (scores and/or recordings) composed in a student’s first three years at UB.
For the analysis component, a student presents ten analyses of contemporary music over the course of an academic year to their composition advisor. The choice of the compositions is determined by the advisor in consultation with the student. After the presentations are concluded, a 15 to 20-page paper is required that focuses on three of the presented works. For the other two parts of the qualifying exam, a student chooses two additional advisors for their committee from different areas of the department (performance, musicology, theory) by the end of their third year of study. With each advisor, they develop a research topic which they explore over the course of their fourth year, resulting in a final 15 to 20-page paper for each topic.
The dissertation is an ambitious composition of substance with an accompanying performance or recording. In addition to the composition is a 10-page paper discussing the composition as well as the student’s general aesthetic orientation and concerns. The graduation examination is a public presentation by the student of their music, particularly their dissertation composition, before the committee.
Each year a student is given the opportunity for teaching assistantships, research assistantships and, as they advance towards candidacy, instructorships. Both teaching assistantships and instructorships vary across the spectrum of courses offered for undergraduate students that include courses in composition, music theory, musicology, and music technology. Research assistantships are often to assist professors in their research and teaching activities as well as programming events and lectures for the Center for 21st Century Music.
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 in combination with having composed new music.
