Dec 02, 2024  
2024-2025 Undergraduate and Graduate Catalog 
    
2024-2025 Undergraduate and Graduate Catalog

Music, B.M.: Composition Concentration


About the Music B.M. Program


The Bachelor of Music in Music offers four concentrations: music education, composition, performance, and theory. The concentration in music education prepares students to teach choral, instrumental, and general classroom music in kindergarten, elementary, middle, junior high, and senior high schools, with specializations in piano/keyboard, voice, brass, woodwind, percussion, and stringed instruments. The performance concentration includes specializations in piano/keyboard, voice, brass, woodwind, percussion, and stringed instruments.

Communication Literacy Requirement. Communication literacy in music is evidenced by competence in reading, writing, speaking, listening, and performing. This comprehensive approach to “musical” communication literacy is apparent in all undergraduate music degrees by matriculation and completion of our three-semester series of musicology courses (i.e. music as cultural history). There is a very distinct sequential approach to “musical” communication literacy by the orderly completion of these courses with a research paper and basic listening skills enhanced in the form of journals employed in the beginning course of the sequence, MUHL 2301  and further through the culminating course MUHL 3303 , where performance practice, critical listening, and role-playing are the hallmarks of musical integration and communication. Courses in the Communication Literacy plan are (1) MUHL 2301 , (2) MUHL 3302 , and (3) MUHL 3303 .

Recommended Curriculum


First Year


Fall


Total: 18

Spring


Total: 15

Second Year


Fall


Total: 15

Spring


Total: 18

Third Year


Continuance in music composition requires a formal review and approval of all first- and second-year work. The principal criteria are completion of all academic requirements through the second year and a grade average in music theory courses of no less than a B.

Fall


Total: 15

Spring


  • 2 Semester Credit Hours
  • Life and Physical Sciences 4 Semester Credit Hours *
  • Ensemble 1 Semester Credit Hours
  • Upper-Level Music Composition Elective 3 Semester Credit Hours (in consultation with advisor)
Total: 15-16

Fourth Year


Fall


Total: 18

Spring


Total: 14

Total Hours: 128


* Choose from the university’s core curriculum .
† Candidates for the Bachelor of Music degree with a concentration in music composition are required to present a recital of their original compositions during the senior year. Permission to present the recital must be obtained from the composition faculty one semester prior to the recital.