Department of Musicology

The UCLA Musicology Department is part of the Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA, which also includes Music and Ethnomusicology departments.

The mission of the UCLA Musicology department is to foster transformative critical thinking about music and musical practices. It defines its subject as broadly as possible, and seeks to integrate musical analysis, interpretations, social/cultural theory, performance, and historiography at all levels of specialization from general education to professional musicological training.

Musicologists study the history, cultural contexts, and interpretation of music. While the discipline has tended, historically, to focus largely on European art-music repertories, in recent decades it has expanded to include many other traditions as well as other regions, in line with the syncretic vision of the Herb Alpert School. The Department of Musicology at UCLA now leads the field nationally and internationally in offering advanced training within this broader vision of the discipline.