A Comprehensive and Close-Knit Musical Learning Community

UConn’s Department of Music has four interdependent purposes:

1. To educate music students to become performers, scholars, and teachers

2. To provide students across the University with courses and performing activities
in which they can cultivate their creative skills and artistic sensibilities in music of
diverse cultures and historical eras

3. To make significant scholarly and artistic contributions to the field of music
through a balanced and integrated approach to research/creative activity,
performance, and composition

4. To engage local, regional, and state communities with public concerts, lectures,
and school outreach programs.

The Department is made up of approximately fifty faculty members, who are among the nation’s top-performing artists, teachers, and scholars. Its student body comprises thirty graduate students in performance, music history, and music theory as well as around 180 undergraduates pursuing bachelor’s degrees in music. This size complements the Department’s comprehensive scope to make for an especially rich experience: nearly all students — from opera singers to jazz improvisers to music historians — will collaborate in the classroom and on the performance stage. In addition, our small class sizes permit the faculty to devote careful attention to students’ abilities and needs.

Ours is the most comprehensive public university music program in New England, offering the BA, BM, MA, MM, DMA, and Ph.D., and bringing together students from a wide range of musical backgrounds and experiences to study in a close-knit learning community of musicians within a large research university. In our curriculum, we emphasize fundamental musical knowledge and skills, based in the western classical tradition, to provide a solid foundation of musicianship for the 21st century.

UConn’s proximity to Hartford, Boston, and New York City provides students with many opportunities to experience the work of world-class performers active in those cities, some of whom are on its faculty. All undergraduate music majors participate in the Department’s ensemble program and receive private lessons from faculty members on their primary instrument. The Department’s active performance schedule consists of recitals by students, faculty members, and visiting artists as well as concerts by the Department’s ensembles. Lectures and masterclasses by scholars and visiting artists are another regular feature of the life of the Department. Collaboration with other departments and areas within UConn’s School of Fine Arts is common: operas are regularly produced in the Nafe Katter Theater in collaboration with students and faculty in the Department of Dramatic Arts, master classes given by visiting artists often occur at the Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts, and student concerts are regularly presented at the Benton Museum of Art.

For all program inquiries or questions about events, please email music@uconn.edu, or call us at 860-486-3728.

The University of Connecticut is an accredited institutional member of the National Association of Schools of Music.