Music
Academic Department Introduction
The Music Department offers a highly regarded academic program and wide range of outstanding performance activities, creating an ideal environment for students to combine serious musical study with a traditional liberal arts curriculum.
For students who wish to undertake focused exploration of music history, theory, composition, ethnomusicology, digital media, experimental music, and performance practice, our academic curriculum includes programs for a music major or minor. For those who wish to take music as an elective, numerous course offerings require no special background.
Our department comprises three programs: the academic program; the performance program, which welcomes students of all levels to take lessons and participate in ensembles; and our concert series, which brings world-class musicians and artists to campus to present their work and engage directly with students.
Learning goals
Read, understand, and interpret music.
Recognize specific styles of composers and performers, and identify the progression and evolution of music in space and time.
Cultivate creativity with other performers and collaborate with an accompanist, an ensemble, or in chamber music.
Find one’s unique style within the performing medium, such as improvisation, and communicate and express emotion though the voice or learned instrument.
Use music technology to manipulate sound and create musical compositions, including the production of music in concert, exhibition, and multimedia performance.
Programs of Study
Music major and minor
Students will demonstrate and describe a wide variety of performance practices in styles encompassing classical, jazz, digital, and various world traditions.
Course Highlights
Advanced Harmony
MUS315
Beginning with traditional four-part chorale writing, MUS 315 explores the more advanced concepts inherent to tonal harmony, voice-leading, and formal analysis. Topics include diatonic and chromatic modulations, embellishments, mode mixture, variation, development procedures such as diatonic and chromatic sequences, and the relationship between harmony and tonal form.
Over the course of the semester, students will be introduced to basic theory terminology and modes of analysis. In addition to listening to and analyzing a number of tonal works inside and outside of the classical canon, students will complete weekly assignments in writing in the tonal idiom and several composition projects. Musicianship lab supplements the class meetings.
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Topic for Spring 2024: Listening to and Performing Salsa Music. This course is a deep dive into one of the most important and influential genres of American music. In the 1970s, salsa music introduced the world to the stories and complex identities of the Latino/x people living in the Caribbean, the United States and beyond. . In this course, we will explore the history and evolution of salsa music from its roots in West African drumming, the development of son music in Cuba and its eventual transformation into salsa in the 1970s in New York City. Salsa music’s important and lasting legacy will also be discussed. The course will explore historical, musical, and cultural aspects of salsa with an emphasis on experiential, hands-on music making in class. We will explore this genre from a variety of critical lenses such as postcolonial, queer, and gender theories.
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Topic for Fall 2023: Expressing Race and Gender through New Music. This course takes its spark from recent global and on-campus conversations around race and anti-racism in relation to the arts, particularly music composed and created during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Students will become familiar with “canonical works” by (predominantly male, some female, and mostly white Euro-American) composers. However, the primary focus is on the creative achievements of under-represented composers and musicians identifying as Black, Latinx, East Asian, and Native American. This course inverts the balance by privileging the artistic accomplishments of composers and musicians who usually reside at the margins of “central” conversations. Our goal is to understand what the traditional category of “modernism and music” reveals about history and society from typically less represented cultural/racial/gendered perspectives. Students will undertake critical listening/viewing/reading assignments and reflect on live performances through writing.
Places and spaces
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Performance spaces
Our department is housed in the historic Jewett Arts Center, which contains the 320-seat Jewett Auditorium, and in Pendleton West, where there are two additional performance spaces: a beautiful chamber music hall (Sargent Music Salon) and a large ensemble practice space (Grand Hall). -
Music library
Containing a rich, diverse collection of Western classical music, jazz, world music, musical theater, and popular music, the library has over 10,000 CDs of every kind of music and collections of music online, available 24/7 to the Wellesley College community. -
Practice rooms
We have 22 practice rooms, most of which contain Steinway grand pianos. -
Sound lab
Providing state-of-the-art workstations for computer music composition, keyboard harmony, and theory instruction, the lab serves as both classroom and computer lab.
Research highlights
Our faculty is composed of academics and musicians whose credentials include concerts and shows at acclaimed venues, collaborations with music luminaries, recordings, and live broadcasts. They also teach at local conservatories and music schools.
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Professor Gurminder Kaur Bhogal’s research focuses on relationships between music and the visual arts, most recently in Claude Debussy’s Clair de Lune (Oxford University Press, 2018).
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Professor Kaleb Goldschmitt’s book, Bossa Mundo: Brazilian Music in Transnational Media Industries (Oxford University Press, 2020), studies the moments of popular breakthrough for Brazilian music among English-speaking people in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Opportunities
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Wellesley College Concert Series
Presenting classical, jazz, early music, electronic, and world music, the series features visiting artists and performing faculty, as well as performances by our faculty-directed student ensembles. Some concerts are livestreamed and archived on YouTube.
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Performing ensembles
Ensembles, directed by faculty members, include the Brandeis-Wellesley Orchestra, the Chamber Music Society, Wellesley College Choir, Chamber Singers, Collegium Musicum, Wellesley BlueJazz Ensemble Program, Yanvalou Drum and Dance Ensemble, and the Guild of Carillonneurs.
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Private instruction
We offer private instruction in voice as well as a wide variety of instruments, in classical, jazz, and world music genres.
Beyond Wellesley
Beyond Wellesley
Many of our graduates pursue careers related to music—playing, performing, recording, teaching—with some earning advanced degrees. Whatever their field, music continues to play a significant role in their work.
Recent Employers
Department of Music
106 Central Street
Wellesley, MA 02481