Best Grad Programs for Music History

mamenyu
Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:15:33 +0000

Just about any of the top schools will have a faculty member who will suit your needs – you want to work with a well-established and well-connected professor for your dissertation, but that is years down the road and you may well change your interests before then, during your coursework and preparation for comps. You may also find out that the person you thought you would work with is a jerk. If the person has a reputation of being hard to work with, avoid him/her. Unlike performance, students generally look to get into a school, not so much to work with a particular professor – and the heavy competition makes it unrealistic to set your sights so precisely anyway. (There are exceptions, of course: Taruskin at Cal is a specialist in Russian music and has many students writing about Bartok, diaspora studies, postcolonialism; Susan McClary at UCLA does feminist stuff, Elaine Sisman at Columbia specializes in Haydn, Bohlmann at Chicago does a lot of interesting stuff with Jewish music, etc. But they all direct a range of dissertations, and really it is going to be up to you to find the topic and do the research – professors are less helpful for the most part than you might imagine or hope when it comes to directing dissertations.) The UK programs are quite different: there, you specialize immediately and can finish in far less time – the masters is usually a year and then you get the PhD in 3 more years after that. There is some prejudice in the US academia that UK degrees are less prestigious because of that specialization (I know of musicology profs who have said this), but it would depend on how good your dissertation was, who you worked with, if you were able to publish articles while in graduate school, etc.
As to transfers (after the MA), I know of students who transfered to Harvard and
Columbia from places like Brandeis, Stony Brook, and Royal Holway.