BA Critical Studies in Music and Society

The B.A. in Critical Studies in Music and Society allows you to design an undergraduate music degree around your career interests in music. The program welcomes students with strong academic backgrounds and with diverse musical interests, skills, or experiences.

A robust core of twenty-seven hours in ethnomusicology and music history culminates in a capstone research, professional, or creative project. A maximum of fifteen hours of music electives and twenty-seven general electives offers students flexibility to tailor the degree to their career objectives, which might range from business to law, medicine, tech, and beyond.

This degree thus trains students to communicate about music across broad and diverse audiences and to conduct the original research necessary to answer the questions facing music industries today.

Seminar topics include:

• Music under Capitalism: Histories & Futures
• Histories of Music Production from Printing to Streaming
• Musical Roots and Routes: Cultural Identity, Immigration, and Diasporic Communities
• Music and Race Formation
• Music, Nationalism, and Decolonial Listening
• Music, Climate, and Technology from Beethoven to the Blockchain
• Sounded Divinity: Music in the World's Religions
• Sound, Media, and Virtual Communities