MA in Music

Course Requirements

Master of Arts in Music students are required to take a minimum of ten courses to complete the two-year program. Typically, five of those courses will be taken within the selected concentration (including capstone project, which typically is taken as a course in the first or second semester of the second year), and three outside the concentration. In other words, composers might be encouraged to sample courses such as African Music Systems, Research in Musicology, and Contemporary Concert Music in addition to four semesters of Composition Seminar and Thesis. In like fashion, ethnomusicologists, musicologists, and theorists will be encouraged to synergize with serious, related ideas outside their concentrations. Tufts University is unusually strong in the areas of music cognition, linguistics, sociology, and the anthropology of music; students are invited to sample from these and many other offerings along with their core courses.

Ensemble Participation

Graduate students are heartily encouraged to participate in one or more of the any performance ensembles that are a lynchpin of our Music department, although only one performance course credit may be applied toward the graduate degree (others may be taken officially for no credit). There are also ample opportunities for intellectual and musical engagement on an informal basis at Tufts, including an auspicious Monday Colloquium Series and periodic Graduate Discussion Groups that address areas of interest across the sub-disciplines.