Dear Alumni and Friends:

Welcome to the Department of Musicology! You may be here because you majored or minored in Music History, and/or completed a minor in the Music Industry; perhaps you had a powerful experience reading, writing, and thinking about music in one of our General Education courses on opera, rock'n'roll, electronic dance music, Mozart, or any of the myriad kinds of music from the medieval to the postmodern that we study, teach, and perform. Maybe you participated in the department's Early Music Ensemble, or are the (rightly) proud possessor of a Ph.D. in Musicology. Some may be trying make contact with the Historical Musicology section of the Music Department. Others may simply have an interest in musical scholarship and becoming a Friend of Musicology at UCLA. If so, you're in the right place!

The current Musicology Department began as a section within UCLA's original Department of Music, in what was once called the UCLA College of Fine Arts; it has for almost thirty years now been a separate department of the UCLA Division of Humanities. For the last five years, Musicology has been one of three music-related departments at UCLA aligned under the banner of the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. Through all these changes, the department's mission has continued: as we now phrase it, "to foster transformative critical thinking about music and musical practices."

We continue to be the place at UCLA for the historical study of Western music, and sponsor the university's Early Music Ensemble, which in recent years has been revitalized and re-equipped with a new generation of period instruments. (Financial support here is especially welcome; those viols don't string themselves!) In recent years the department has broadened its focus to encompass popular music, contemporary music, and music in a global perspective: current faculty research initiatives include music, capitalism, and advertising; Stravinsky's Persephone; Russian popular music and culture; music and post-colonial theory; music in the golden age of Spanish theater; medieval song; tone and timbre in popular music; the American musical; voice/body/sound studies, contemporary opera, and technology.

We have been instrumental in creating new joint curricula for the Herb Alpert School of Music, and are an integral part of the School's new minor in the Music Industry. The Department's Robert Stevenson Lectureship brings internationally renowned music scholars to UCLA: past lecturers include Richard Taruskin, Martha Feldman, Maynard Solomon, George Lewis, and Tess Knighton. Our graduate program was recently ranked the #1 music (non-performance) graduate program in the country by the National Research Council, and graduates of our Musicology Ph.D. program are teaching across the nation and the world. All of this work can benefit from even modest sponsorship; a small donation can make a huge difference to the progress of a dissertation, the funding of a conference, or even the repair of a delicate old harpsichord.

In any case, we look forward to staying in touch with you and we would be grateful if you could enter or update your contact information on the "Keep in Touch With Us" page so that we can let you know occasionally via email about the department and its program of concerts, lectures, and other events. If you have any comment on our website or would like to send us your news or get more involved with the department, please don't hesitate to drop me a line at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Your interest and involvement are what we wish to cultivate, and your input is most welcome. Your participation and support means very much to UCLA and our department, and we are very grateful to you.

I look forward to hearing from you and seeing you at our events!

Best wishes,

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