Through multiple modes of inquiry and experience, the department advances new ways of understanding music as both creative expression and cultural practice throughout the world. The department promotes musical education, research, and engagement at the highest standards of excellence on an open and inclusive basis.
Department of Music
Department of Music
The Department of Music is a community of scholars, creators, and performers dedicated to exploring music’s past, present, and future.
Department of Music
The Department of Music is a community of scholars, creators, and performers dedicated to exploring music’s past, present, and future.
Academics
Undergraduate
Our diverse curriculum combines creative courses in composition, technology, and performance with speculative studies in history, theory, ethnomusicology, philosophy, and musical aesthetics.
Graduate
At Brown, your degree is what you make it: the more adventurous you are, the more exciting your program is likely to be.
Music Making
The Department of Music at Brown offers a huge array of performing opportunities, all available for academic credit.
Students seeking to improve their playing or singing ability have the option of taking individual private lessons with about thirty professional musicians from the greater Boston-Providence area.
Recent News
Over winter break, Associate Professor of Music Eric Nathan was at a mountain retreat in Italy when he got inspiration for a violin concerto... one of Nathan’s three projects for his three-year position as an inaugural composer in residence for the R.I. Philharmonic... [he] plans to compose two other “dream projects”: a symphony and a requiem.
“These are all really big pieces that one doesn’t get the opportunity to work on often,” he said, noting that more modern compositions tend to be shorter due to rehearsal time constraints, while the pieces he’s working on are longer works like many older compositions.
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“These are all really big pieces that one doesn’t get the opportunity to work on often,” he said, noting that more modern compositions tend to be shorter due to rehearsal time constraints, while the pieces he’s working on are longer works like many older compositions.
Brown Arts Institute
Music Ph.D. [James May] Brings the Sounds of the Gulf Coast to the Granoff Center
James May, a Ph.D. student in Brown's Music and Multimedia Composition program, presented an immersive installation inspired by his time living in New Orleans in April 2026. In a featured video, May describes the project, the ideas that animate him, and how he translated those ideas into eventually there's nowhere.
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News from the Department of Music
Sofía Fresco Named 2026 Recipient of the Neil Rosenberg Bluegrass Scholar Award
Brown University PhD candidate Sofía Fresco (formerly Chiarandini) is a recipient of the 2026 Neil Rosenberg Bluegrass Scholar Award by the International Bluegrass Music Association.
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