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
The Providence Journal
Brown University was going to throw away a piano. Why it's now decomposing in the woods.
A story about PhD candidate Devanney Haruta's Piano (de)composition project. “I think there’s something beautiful about a very simple idea that gains complexity over time,” Haruta said. “The idea to put something outside, that in itself isn’t a very complex idea, but then the complexities emerge from watching and observing and playing and interacting,” she said.
Starting with the question of what happens when a piano is placed outside, now she has more questions about how a piano is made. She has questions about the environmental impact of pianos and how materials are used. She has questions about the attachments people form with their instruments and why a piano outside elicits such an emotional reaction from so many people.
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Starting with the question of what happens when a piano is placed outside, now she has more questions about how a piano is made. She has questions about the environmental impact of pianos and how materials are used. She has questions about the attachments people form with their instruments and why a piano outside elicits such an emotional reaction from so many people.
News from the Department of Music
In Memoriam: Ludwig "Lutz" Rath
The Brown University Department of Music remembers Lutz Rath.
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Though it’s relatively new to Brown’s arts scene, the Black Music Lab — an in-development hub that works to amplify both artists on campus and beyond — has already managed to establish its presence on College Hill.
Currently housed within the Brown Arts Institute, the lab was founded in fall 2022 by Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, the project’s faculty director, and Charrisse Barron, an ethnomusicologist who has taught at Brown and is now an assistant professor of music at Harvard.
“We noticed or recognized that there were so many amazing programs happening on campus in terms of Black musical performance and study, but it was kind of dispersed,” Lumumba-Kasongo said. Forming the lab was a way to both amplify artistic projects occurring on campus and connect them to creative work being done in the greater Providence community, she added.
Read Article
Currently housed within the Brown Arts Institute, the lab was founded in fall 2022 by Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, the project’s faculty director, and Charrisse Barron, an ethnomusicologist who has taught at Brown and is now an assistant professor of music at Harvard.
“We noticed or recognized that there were so many amazing programs happening on campus in terms of Black musical performance and study, but it was kind of dispersed,” Lumumba-Kasongo said. Forming the lab was a way to both amplify artistic projects occurring on campus and connect them to creative work being done in the greater Providence community, she added.