The Department of Music is a leader in its field, training distinguished scholars as well as prize-winning composers and performers. Our alumni become conductors of orchestras and choruses, or go on to solo or orchestral performing careers, or to become singers in opera companies around the world. Many of our graduates are now writing music for television and film.
Undergraduates find their calling, whether traditional or avant-garde. From Ethnomusicology to Percussion to Composition, there are ways to forge a program suited to your passions -- be they theoretically- or performance-driven.
Supporting it all is a large complex of teaching studios, classrooms, practice rooms, three performance halls, and an outdoor concert bowl. We host a state-of-the-art Music Laboratory, and the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE). Our Music Library houses a collection of more than 120,000 holdings, including over 30,000 LPs and over 12,000 CDs.
Related Programs
CREATE is situated within the Department of Music and has strong ties to the Media Art and Technology program and the Allosphere research facility.
The Center is an association of faculty and students that promotes the study of music across academic disciplines.
Music News & Features
This spring, UCSB’s Humanities and Fine Arts Division hosted a creativity contest to highlight the work of creative students across the UCSB campus. Here are the first and second prize winners in the music category.
Stained Glass Productions, a new student-run theater collective at UC Santa Barbara, staged its first production, "Seasons of Broadway: A Cabaret," hoping to give students more opportunities to perform musical theater. The ensemble of 16 students performed from multiple renowned musicals, all songs falling into the theme of fall, winter, spring, or summer.
The Catalyst is a student-run literary magazine that UC Santa Barbara students can participate in through the English Department. They recently held a fundraiser that gave students, advisors, and community members a chance to enjoy live music and spoken word poetry in an effort to fund the next physical publication.
Max Jack, a researcher and an alumnus of the Ethnomusicology Ph.D. program at UC Santa Barbara, recently spoke to students and faculty about his experience navigating the academic job market in the United States and abroad. Jack also gave advice on doing research and submitting to academic journals.
Professor Fabio Rambelli from UCSB’s Religious Studies and East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies departments, speaks about hosting “The Transcultural Exploratorium: Neuro Music and Japanese Culture” event and how he exposed the UCSB community to traditional Japanese sounds.
Musician and composer Gene Coleman spoke to a UC Santa Barbara audience about his work in Neuro Music. With compositions inspired by the brain’s auditory pathways, Coleman studies music from a neuroaesthetic perspective for creative production.
UC Santa Barbara graduate student Gulia Gurevich last week shared her research into Uzbek music history, in a joint lecture and recital. Gurevich presented Uzbek history as it influenced music, and discussed women’s role in music as a professional and educational field. After her lecture, she performed several different Uzbek works, including both solo and duo pieces.
Richard Croy, the new production and events manager for UCSB’s Music department, sat down for a Q&A to discuss his experience in theater and producing, as well as his plans to revitalize Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall.
The 2022-2023 web and social media intern team in the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts covered an array of events for the HFA website and social media platforms this year. Meet the faces behind the stories.
UCSB’s World Indian Ensemble led an hour-long performance in the Department of Music’s Music Bowl, as part of its World Music Series. The ensemble is headed by Department of Music professor Scott Marcus and will hold an end-of-year recital on June 8th.
Music student Jason Cathcart is deeply involved in the arts at UCSB, and spends his time performing and sharing his love for music with the community. He plays about ten instruments, and is president of the Poets’ Club, where he recently released his own personal poetry magazine, Dizziness Great!
Humanities and Fine Arts student intern Faith Harvey moderated a discussion to mark Mental Health Awareness Month about the links between mental health and arts and humanities. She was joined by panelists Ellen O’Connell Whittet, a UC Santa Barbara continuing lecturer in the Writing Program, and Breana Gilcher, a UC Santa Barbara lecturer in the Department of Music. During this hour-long Zoom webinar, the HFA faculty members discussed their own mental health experiences, trends in mental health they’ve noticed among UCSB students and what advice they would give those suffering from burn out.
This spring, UCSB’s Humanities and Fine Arts Division hosted a creativity contest to highlight the work of student across the UCSB campus. Check out our video and music category winners.
UCSB’s Division of Humanities and Fine Arts celebrated Give Day last week with its annual Creativity Contest. Students from all majors and years submitted works in different categories—photography, prose, poetry, visual art, music and video—for the opportunity to be published on the HFA website. The winners were honored at a luncheon award ceremony.
UC Santa Barbara composition program chair Joao Pedro Oliveira recently showed his latest visual music opera — “The 70th Week” — in downtown Santa Barbara, as part of the Corwin Chair Concert Series. In an interview with communication student Sarah Phan, Oliveira talked about the work’s biblical inspiration, and the challenges he faced as a composer during the COVID-19 lockdown.