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.
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 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.
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 in combination with having composed new music.
