The Department of Music at the University of California, Riverside, invites applicants for the PhD and MA/PhD programs in Ethnomusicology, Historical Musicology, and Digital Composition. Graduate students are prepared for careers in academia or the public sector.
The Digital Composition graduate program at UC Riverside offers innovative approaches to acoustic, electronic, and electroacoustic music creation. This program is designed for composers and music-centered interdisciplinary artists interested in exploring cutting-edge techniques in composition and production. Students have opportunities to learn Max/MSP and create electronic instruments. Areas of focus include but are not limited to software development; music technology; and opera, musical theater, and works for stage.
Graduate students in Historical Musicology at UCR receive a thorough grounding in the discipline’s methodologies and current trends. Students pursuing a master’s degree are free to explore any area of research that is of interest to them. Those pursuing a doctorate will benefit from the department’s conspicuous strengths in the Ibero-American music heritage.
The Ethnomusicology graduate program engages students in practice-based research across a wide variety of geo-cultural areas. With strong theoretical underpinning, it also draws from interdisciplinary strengths across UCR including in gender and sexuality studies, Latin American studies, hip hop studies, Indigenous studies, and Southeast Asian studies. Among the program’s longstanding assets is its innovative focus on public-facing research and practice.
UCR’s strengths include:
· A unique program in Music Industry Studies
· Innovative composition and performance opportunities
· An interdisciplinary program in Southeast Asia: Texts, Rituals, Performance
· A vibrant interdisciplinary community in Indigenous Studies; UCR hosts the California Center for the Native Nations
· Hip hop faculty specialists in the Music Department and across campus, including in Critical Dance Studies and Theatre
· Center for Iberian and Latin American Music
· Strong interdisciplinary focuses on the level of individual faculty members as well as across the university more broadly
For more information and to apply, visit https://grad.ucr.edu/apply/
The application deadline is December 31, 2024
Faculty:
Rogério Budasz: Musicologist specialized in the music of Brazil and Portugal, lute and guitar cultures, and early opera. Interested in the transatlantic circulation of musicians and repertories between Brazil, Europe, and West Africa during the colonial period and nineteenth century.
Bradley Butterworth: Works with graduate and undergraduate students to develop professional skill sets in the music industry. Emphasis on music production, mixing, mastering, recording, live sound, audio networking.
Paulo Chagas: Music technologies, semiotics, new media, interactivity, Brazilian music.
Xóchitl C. Chávez: the first tenured Chicana in UC Riverside’s Music Department. She is an Activist Scholar, feminist, musician, and dancer who bridges academic research with Mexican Indigenous and Latino cultural practices, advancing Public facing and transborder scholarship.
Ian Dicke: Composer, musician, and software designer inspired by the intersection of technology and social-political culture.
Walter Clark: Musicologist specializing in the Ibero-American musical heritage, with a particular focus on Spanish composers, performers, and music of the last 150 years.
Dana Kaufman: Composer-librettist specializing in opera, musical theater, and other works for stage, as well as in the intersections between pop culture, queerness, and classical music.
Samuel Lamontagne: Ethnomusicologist of hip hop and electronic dance music in Los Angeles, and in the African diaspora more generally. Research in music as a medium of Pan-African solidarity that can help us trace Black radical genealogies. Alongside H. Samy Alim and Tabia Shawel, he co-leads the UCLA Hip Hop Initiative.
Liz Przybylski: Ethnomusicologist and pop music scholar focusing on hip hop, gender in the music industry, and Indigenous popular music. Research and practice in hybrid digital-physical ethnographic methods.
Jonathan Ritter: Music in the Andes, memory, violence, performance, Afro-Hispanic and Indigenous cultures.
Leonora Saavedra: Mexico, US-Mexico power relations, post-coloniality, strategic self-representation, constructions of the indigenous, theories of nationalism, Marxism.
Amy Skjerseth: Popular music and audiovisual media scholar with additional interests in sound studies, voice studies, technology, digital culture, avant-gardes, gender and sexuality, and practice-based research.
Located 50 miles east of Los Angeles, our 1,200-acre campus is equidistant from the desert, mountains, and ocean, and is within easy driving distance to most of the major cultural and recreational offerings of Southern California.