The IU Musicology Department, ranked by the National Research Council as one of the best musicology programs in the nation, is a close and friendly community of scholars. We offer a large and active faculty covering a wide range of approaches to music, strong financial aid, an outstanding music library, ample teaching opportunities, and the resources of a major research university and comprehensive school of music.
FACULTY
Our faculty includes ten full-time members along with a visiting member, offering complete chronological coverage and a broad range of methodologies and approaches. (Details are here.)
- Jennifer Saltzstein Chair: Medieval music, intertextuality and musical borrowing, ecomusicology, music and technology
- Matthew Blackmar: Hip-hop and digital music practices, privatization of music copyright, 19th-century sheet music printing, musical authorship and borrowing
- Phil Ford: American popular music, cultural studies, sound and media, radical and counter-cultural intellectual history
- Halina Goldberg: 19th- and 20th-century Poland and Eastern Europe, Chopin, cultural studies, music and politics, performance practice, reception, Jewish studies
- Bess Xintong Liu: 20th century global music history, Sino-Western musical exchange, women’s transnational musicianship
- Kristina Muxfeldt: Late 18th- and early 19th-century music and culture, Lieder, stage works, social history
- Massimo Ossi: Renaissance and Baroque music, early 17th-century Italian music theory and aesthetics, Italian lyric poetry and madrigal 1550–1650, Vivaldi
- Sergio Ospina Romero: Sound reproduction, jazz, Latin American music, transnationalism in the early 20th century
- Jacquelyn Sholes: Late Classical, Romantic, and Modern music; music and narrative; identity and historical self-positioning in music; borrowing; music and propaganda; Brahms and Beethoven; Bernstein
- Ayana Smith: Baroque music; opera, aesthetics, and visual culture (1650–1750); race and representation in music history pedagogy; women and gender in music
- Giovanni Zanovello: 15th-century Italian musical institutions, Florence, music and learning, Heinrich Isaac
DEGREES
We offer two degrees. The MA focuses on music history and literature and on analytical skills and normally takes two years in residence (overview is here). There is also a joint MA/MLS program in music librarianship (details are here). The PhD typically requires two and a half years of course work (research seminars, methods courses, electives and a minor); qualifying exams at the end of the third year; and a dissertation (details are here) Admission ordinarily requires a master’s degree, but exceptionally qualified students may be admitted directly from an undergraduate program.
CLASSES
Regular classes include period courses (Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classic, Romantic, Modern, Music Since 1960); American music; composers (including Hildegard von Bingen, Isaac, Josquin, Monteverdi, V. Galilei, Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Telemann, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert, Verdi, Mahler, Ives, Stravinsky, Gershwin, Ravel and Bartók); genres including the polyphonic mass, motet, chorale settings, symphonic literature, chamber music, and opera; and topics including race in American musical theater, jazz around the world, Wagnerism, recording: Edison to Spotify, women and music, genderless music, music and identity in Latin America, music and mourning, African American Music, performance practice, operas and plays, music in Eastern Europe, film music history, writing about music, and opera to 1637, and Polish avant-garde composers.
Topics of recent PhD seminars have included Music, Sound, and Violence, Beethoven’s World, Music in Early-Modern Cities, Weird Studies, Die Zauberflöte , Shadow Histories: Race and Gender, Mediterranean Musical Encounters, Approaches to Musical Theater, The Season of Figaro, Instrumental Mimesis 1580-1720, Music in Esoteric Studies, Music & Politics in the Other Europe, Technologies of Experience, Music Collectorship, Music in 19th-Century Albums, Reading Music Theory, Musical Borrowing, Don Giovanni, Sound Media & Performance, Western Musical Aesthetics, Music Since the 1960s, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, The Italian Madrigal 1530-1650, Opera: Gender/Voice/Aesthetics, Song Opera & Theater in Early 19th-Century Vienna, Opera in Arcadia, Music in Renaissance Florence, Chopin, The Romantic Piano 1790-1860, Positioning Schubert/Beethoven, Imagination in Baroque Opera, Music and Philosophy, and Music and Humanism.
Recent methods courses include Inclusive Music Histories, Selling Your Scholarship, Historiography, Cultural Studies, German Translation, Research Methods of Afro-American Music, Cultural History of Music, Pedagogy of Music History, Film Musicology, Italian Translation, and Music and Digital Humanities.
ACADEMIC LIFE
Departmental academic life finds a focus in the Musicology Colloquium Series, a near-weekly forum for the presentation and discussion of research by graduate students and faculty members. Masters students participate in a Musicology Reading Group for discussions of recent literature. Other academic and musical resources include the Department’s digital humanities center (the Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature), the William & Gayle Cook Music Library, the Department of Music Theory, the Historical Performance Institute, the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology (in the College of Arts and Sciences), the Archives of Traditional Music, the Latin American Music Center, and the Lilly Library (rare books and manuscripts). The Department has hosted conferences on Mozart, Chopin, Isaac, Handel, Penderecki, Handel, and Music & Trauma. We cultivate connections with interdisciplinary units including Comparative Literature, Medieval Studies, Renaissance Studies, Jewish Studies, the Russian and East European Institute, and the O’Neill Arts Administration program. Extensive language programs are available through the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies.
There are ample opportunities for teaching. PhD students serve as Associate Instructors in the undergraduate music history course. Advanced PhD students teach sections of graduate review courses and summer courses for undergraduates and graduate students. There are also opportunities to teach in the university’s General Studies program and in residential programs.
Students have recently completed dissertations on avant-garde music in communist Cuba, music and travel narratives in the 19th century, music under Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, networks of Venetian musicians, memory in Schumann, digital approaches to Troubadour song, singing lyric poetry in Southern Italy during the 15th century, Jan Ladislav Dussek, experimentalism in the 1960s, music antiquarianism in 18th-century Britain, Kennedy’s art policy, American binders’ volumes, Peter Maxwell Davies, sampling in hip-hop, Italian madrigal prints, nostalgia in Puccini’s operas, George Chadwick’s chamber music, Messiaen, Vincenzo Galilei, radio music, Leonard Bernstein, the Gewandhaus Orchestra under the East German regime, music during the Thirty Years’ War, the avant-garde in Poland, violin virtuosity, English opera, Telemann’s printed cantatas, hybrid East-West opera, Liszt’s arrangements, and New Hollywood cinema. Current dissertations include topics on survivor composers’ response to the Holocaust, modernism and artist communities in early 20th-century US, politics and choral music in 1930s England, listening to music across human and nonhuman species, musical Russia Abroad, trauma in 19th-century opera, music and identity in 19th-century Spain, folk music revival in the 1960s, heavy metal and canonization, Saxon opera during Napoleonic period, and music and identity in Mexico. Students are supported in their research by grants from the DAAD, Fulbright-Hayes, and many other sources. Departmental research funds support research trips and the presentation of papers at conferences. In recent years, these programs have helped students to do research or present at conferences from Boston to Los Angeles and in Italy, Belgium, France, Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, China, Cuba, and Mexico. Advanced students and graduates have had success in finding teaching positions as well as employment in music libraries, archives, editing, and in public broadcasting. Recent academic appointments include the University of South Carolina, the University of Southern California, Hillsdale College, Juilliard, the University of Redlands, the University of Washington, Butler University, Texas Tech University, and Mercer University.
FINANCIAL AID
Generous financial aid is available. Outstanding PhD students are offered a five-year fellowship that include tuition and a stipend (one fellowship year, one year as a graduate assistant, two years as an Associate Instructor, and one year teaching independently). PhD and MA students are also eligible for graduate assistantships and for scholarships. Competitive dissertation-year fellowships are awarded annually along with a partial dissertation fellowship; current students have been awarded a university dissertation fellowship and one from the American Association of University Women.
ADMISSION
Admission is by application (with a writing sample) and by invited interview. The application deadline is December 1; detailed information is available here. The Department looks for MA applicants with strong academic and musical backgrounds and a keen interest in exploring music history and musicology. Successful PhD applicants demonstrate an awareness of musicology as a discipline and preparation to engage in seminars and original research.
LIFE IN BLOOMINGTON
Bloomington is a great place to live and study, with reasonable cost of living, ample housing, arts of all kinds (including more than 1100 concerts each year at the School of Music alone), vibrant outdoor sports and recreation, and cultural diversity (including ethnic food of every kind). The Graduate Musicology Association sponsors social events and an annual house concert.
2021 AMS ANNUAL MEETING
During the 2021 AMS Annual Meeting we will be hosting several events. Please visit our Virtual Booth at AMS or write us for Zoom information if you wish to attend any of the following:
- Friday, November 12, 7:00-9:00 p.m. CST (8:00-10:00 p.m. EST): IU Musicology Online Reception. We will be hosting a reception on Zoom, using breakout rooms to move freely and easily between small groups, just as you would during an in-person reception. This event is open to all who wish to attend, including prospective students, alumni, and anyone who wants to stop by and say hello! Please email musicol@indiana.edu for information.
- Wednesday, November 17, 5:00-6:00 p.m. CST (6:00-7:00 p.m. EST): Graduate Students Open House. Several of our current graduate students will be available via Zoom to meet prospective students and talk with them about the program. Please email Miguel Arango Calle miarango@iu.edu GMA student rep for more information.
- Thursday, November 18, 5:00-6:00 p.m. CST (6:00-7:00 p.m. EST): Virtual IU Musicology Open-House Q & A Session. The Admissions Committee of the IU Musicology Department will hold an open-house Q & A session with prospective applicants. They will talk about our selection criteria, and will answer questions regarding our review process. Register here. Email musicol@iu.edu with questions.
- Saturday, Nov 20, 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM CST (3:00 PM – 4:30 PM EST): The AMS Prospective Graduate Students Reception. Representatives of our department will be available to answer your questions during this event, hosted by the AMS Graduate Education Committee.
- Week of November 15: Individual Meetings with Faculty. Our faculty will be happy to meet one-on-one with applicants to discuss the program. Please email them individually to set up Zoom appointments.
Questions?
We’d be pleased to hear from you. Please contact us at musicol@iu.edu. Or write to the department chair, Prof. Halina Goldberg, or to members of the faculty who share your interests (addresses are on this page). For technical questions about applying to IU, please consult the Jacobs School of Music’s admission and financial aid office here.