Graduate studies in music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison provide students with a supportive environment within which to pursue imaginative research. Our degree programs in historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory are small and flexible, offering rigorous and comprehensive instruction in each of the three musicologies grounded on a close interaction and cooperation among graduate students and their faculty colleagues. At the same time, interconnections between the three graduate programs introduce students to a broad range of musical practices and different methodologies. Our commitment to interdisciplinary research encourages students to develop original approaches to music drawing on recent musicological and theoretical initiatives. The curriculum is innovative and wide-ranging, with course offerings in archival and source studies, notation, the construction of music theories, genre, influence and reception, performance practice, race and gender, music criticism, music as intellectual history, and music as social practice. Graduate students may also complement their music studies with courses in a wide range of related disciplines that at the doctoral level constitute the minor. Within the School of Music possible minors include performance, composition, and music education. Other possible minors include anthropology, area studies, international studies, women's studies, Afro-American Studies, artificial intelligence and computer science, cognitive psychology, linguistics, curriculum and instruction, philosophy, comparative literature, critical and cultural studies (through the Havens Center for Social Research), history, art history, history of science, and theater and drama. In all cases, our graduate programs seek both to deepen and widen the domain of musical discourse and to encourage students to follow their own intellectual inclinations and to discover their own musical voices. Students are encouraged to become active in their chosen fields at the regional and national level.

Graduate studies in music theory at the UW-Madison are designed to focus attention on the myriad ways in which theoretical vocabularies and cultural codes mediate our experiences of music. Our students are encouraged to combine intense, personal encounters with music and creative, rigorous engagements with the critical and theoretical literature, the goal being to participate in broader conversations about music and its theories, but also to nudge those conversations in new directions.

A crucial dimension of the program is an interest in how our conversations about music might redirect what we do in the undergraduate classroom. In an effort to situate undergraduate music theory within the broader realm of ideas, our graduate students are encouraged to devise new and creative approaches to classroom instruction but, also, within the context of an ongoing re-evaluation of our own undergraduate program, to imagine alternatives to the traditional music-theory curriculum. Instruction in both the master's and doctoral programs revolves around a core curriculum, an integrated series of courses on Schenker, theories of post-tonal music, and the history of music theory. On average, we offer two seminars each semester on topics of broad musical and music-theoretical interest. Recent seminars have addressed such topics as meter, musical narrative, Adorno, and the string quartets of Bartsk, among others.

The M.A. in music theory is a two-year program that culminates in a thesis on a topic of the student's choosing.

Degree Requirements

• Theory/Composition (660-821/822/823/824 and other 400 level courses), 12 cr.
• Masters Thesis (660-990), 4 cr.
• Music Research Methods and Materials (660-619), 3 cr.
• Musicology and Music Theory, 6 cr.
• Electives