University of California at Los Angeles

UCLA is one of the world’s great research universities, number 11 in London’s Times Higher Education rankings (2010-2011). Our faculty includes Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, multiple MacArthur fellows and scores of national academy members. Interdisciplinary teaching and research is a particular strength, with initiatives in the arts, stem cells and other biosciences, nanoscience, international studies and the environment.

There are almost 40,000 students at UCLA, roughly 27,000 undergraduates and 13,000 graduate and professional students. The student body is diverse both in cultural and economic terms. As many as 36% of UCLA undergraduates receive Pell Grants, given to students whose family income is typically less than $50,000 (Fall 2010). International students account for 17% of graduate students and 5% of undergraduates. U.S. undergraduate ethnicity includes 4% African American, 15% Hispanic, 33% White and 38% Asian/Pacific Islander.

The School of the Arts and Architecture at UCLA (UCLA Arts) plays a vital role in the cultural and artistic life of the campus and the community. Providing a full range of course offerings and programs, the School is comprised of six degree-granting departments: Architecture and Urban Design, Art, Design | Media Arts, Ethnomusicology, Music, and World Arts and Cultures/Dance, six centers: the Art | Global Health Center, the Art | Sci Center, the Center for Intercultural Performance, cityLAB, the Experiential Technologies Center and the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, and The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music (comprising the departments of ethnomusicology, music and musicology.)

Design | Media Arts

The UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts offers a comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to media creation that promotes individual exploration and innovative thinking. The Internationally renowned faculty provide each student with a creative and intellectual foundation for constructing a unique contribution to culture. Cutting-edge technology keeps the innovation of the Department of Design | Media Arts contemporary.

Undergraduate Program

The Design Media Arts (DMA) undergraduate program emphasizes innovative creation with digital and mass media within the context of a public research university. The curriculum features a solid foundation in form, color, space, motion, and interactivity, followed by a broad selection of area studies courses in 3D modeling and animation, gaming, interactive media, networked media, sound, video, and visual communication. This uniquely challenging and diverse program invites students to balance aesthetic sensibility with logical reasoning, formal theories with practical application, and contemporary thought with historical perspective. Most courses are taught as studios of no more than eighteen students, which encourages individual growth and fosters a sense of community within the department.

Rather than focusing on narrow professional development, our curriculum fosters experimentation across a range of different media. We privilege a social outlook, process, experimentation, and personal growth over conservatism and commercialism and we search for students who share the same goals. We strive to provide a broad education that encourages young people to make new connections, to analyze complex situations, and to think critically.

The two-year MFA program focuses on each student's personal development within the context of media arts and design. To culminate their degree, each student produces an individual thesis project that incorporates research and theoretical exploration of a topic that results in a refined body of work and MFA exhibition. DMA graduate students come from many fields including the visual arts, sciences, and engineering. Students spend the first year of the program taking courses that expose them to new ways of thinking and making, which they use to build on their existing expertise. The second year is devoted to thesis definition, exploration, and production through a series of studio and seminar courses. Students have the opportunity to work as teaching assistants and to collaborate with faculty members on research projects throughout their tenure as MFA candidates.

Department of Ethnomusicology

Undergraduate Program

The undergraduate major in Ethnomusicology provides students with a wide-ranging liberal arts education in music. At its core, this includes (1) comprehensive knowledge of music cultures of the world, (2) understanding of the interrelationship of music, society, and culture, (3) grounding in the basics of Western music theory and musicianship, and (4) the experience of playing in one or several musical ensembles from various traditions around the world.

The major is offered with two concentrations: one in jazz studies with emphases in composition and performance, and one in world music with emphases in general world music, performance and/or composition, public ethnomusicology, and scholarly research.

Ethnomusicology majors are also eligible to fulfill a Music Industry minor or a Visual and Performing Arts Education minor.

Graduate Program

At the graduate level, the department offers M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in ethnomusicology with a specialization in systematic musicology. A graduate degree in jazz performance (M.M.) is offered through the Department of Music.

Instruction in ethnomusicology tries to achieve a balance between understanding the important intellectual issues in ethnomusicology and depth of specialization in one or more of the world's music-culture areas including Africa, Europe, the Americas, west, east, south, and southeast Asia. The sounds and structure of music and musical performance are central features of faculty research and teaching, along with interpretations of the complexities of musical sound in social and cultural terms. Underlying the curriculum is a commitment to the theoretical and analytical study of music as well as to the performance of the music and involvement in its cultural context.

In systematic musicology, laboratory research in acoustics, psychoacoustics, and psychology of music has focused on musical communication and expression; music, film, and animation; natural and synthetic instrument timbres; gamelan acoustics and tuning; music perception and cognition, and computer applications in music research. Philosophical work in the program is applying the insights of continental philosophers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Martin Heidegger, and Paul Ricoeur to music and to concepts of musical culture and tradition.

Music

The UCLA Department of Music is dedicated to producing musicians capable of succeeding in today’s highly competitive professional world as performers, composers and educators with degree programs that fully integrate academic and artistic excellence. Gifted students from throughout the world have the opportunity to study with critically acclaimed faculty.

With a strong focus on the musical traditions of Europe and the international and American musical styles of the last century, UCLA's undergraduate program in music integrates the superb academic features of a major research university with intensive artistic study.

Music students have a range of performance opportunities throughout the year.  In addition to participating in at least one of the department's more than 20 ensembles, all students specializing in performance present both junior and senior recitals and perform in the department's noon concert series, which often includes opportunities to solo.  Composition and Music Education students have a senior recital requirement.  Student and faculty performances are held in the 528-seat Schoenberg Auditorium, the 133-seat Jan Popper Theater, and other venues on campus.

The UCLA DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC is dedicated to producing musicians capable of succeeding in the highly competitive world of professional music. At the graduate level, outstanding students who have already honed their music skills will find an environment unparalleled in its support of their maturation as creative and performing artists.

The department offers a distinguished faculty, individualized instruction, and extensive performance opportunities, combined with the resources of a leading research university.

With a strong focus on arts music traditions of both Europe and America and the broad international character of late 
20 th-century music, the program offers students practice in a wide range of contexts.   There is a special emphasis on opportunities for performers and composers to create and perform new music. Students take part in some 20 department ensembles and regularly perform on and off campus.

UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance

The undergraduate program offers concentrations in dance and in world arts and cultures. The dance concentration provides courses in a range of idioms from throughout the world, including a special emphasis on dance composition. Opportunities for performance, production, videography, and movement studies are augmented by courses in the study of the body from historical and cultural perspectives; dance theory; and dance in the public sphere, including arts pedagogy. The world arts and cultures concentration emphasizes cultural studies through visual and performance arts, arts activism, and the dynamics of creativity in global perspective. Courses combine theory and practice and are grounded in diverse cultural artistic expressions, with topics including art as moral action, ethnography as colonialism, arts-based AIDS interruptions, body politics, documentary practice, theories of performance, curating cultures, space and place, and indigenous spiritual traditions. For both concentrations, students are encouraged to complement WAC courses with others offered across campus.

The graduate program offers Master of Arts and Ph.D. degrees in Culture and Performance (CAP) and a Master of Fine Arts in Dance with an emphasis on choreography. CAP students research communities, cultures, and transnational movements through heritage and globalization studies, multi-vocal ethnographies, dance and theories of corporeality and embodiment, visual and material culture, critical museum and curatorial studies, documentary practice and internet interventions, as well as arts activism and interdisciplinary art-making. The MFA in Dance offers opportunities to engage multiple movement practices as students work on pioneering research in the form of new choreography. Students focus on media, dance history, and theories of the body as supplemental to their work as choreographers. Two centers within the department, the Art | Global Health Center and the Center for Intercultural Performance, present further opportunities for learning and practice.