Academic Areas of the Department

About the "Areas" of Our Department

The Department of Music at Columbia University is organized into four academic "areas," reflecting the major divisions of modern musical scholarship. These areas administer distinctive tracks within our graduate program, leading to the degrees of PhD in Musicology (with a specialization in Ethnomusicology, Historical Musicology, or Music Theory) or the DMA in Composition.

While faculty members, post-doctoral fellows, and graduate students are listed as affiliated with particular areas, many of us are members of two or three different areas, and all of us work across these borders to some extent. We embrace an increasingly interdisciplinary approach to music scholarship, even as we maintain longstanding commitments and projects within our home disciplines. 

The areas also work together to provide a broad and comprehensive undergraduate offering for both music majors and the larger undergraduate constituency of the Department. Several distinctive scholarly and musical foci cross-cut our area divisions as well, such as our broad coverage of issues in American music, and our diverse approaches to music/language relationships.

The pages linked below (and in the menu to the left) are portals to the offerings, programs, events, people, and news of each of our areas.

The following faculty members are the heads of the academic areas for 2011-12 and should be contacted with specific inquiries, especially about graduate program admissions:

Heads of Academic Areas (2013-14)

Composition
TBA
Historical Musicology
Professor Elaine Sisman
es53@columbia.edu
Music Theory
Professor Ellie Hisama
eh2252@columbia.edu
Ethnomusicology
Professor Aaron Fox
aaf19@columbia.edu