Student playing cello in an orchestra

Support Music

Music

Our curricula is distinctive in developing musicians who integrate scholarship with performance. It offers both depth and breadth, exploring music and expressive traditions from diverse perspectives and from a diversity of areas, genres, and historical eras, ranging from:

  • African and African diasporic traditions including west African drumming, jazz, blues and hip hop in particular, 
  • Mexican, Latinx and Chicanx expressive traditions such as mariachi, Mexican folklorico dance, son Cubano and son jarocho, 
  • Central and South Asian expressive traditions, 
  • European Art music, including the only undergraduate opera program in the country,  
  • experimental music, with a state of the art electronic music studio. 
Musicians playing a snare drum and a saxophone in a field

How you can support the Music Department at UCSC

We invite you to join the Music Department in our efforts as we:

Support Student Access to World-Class Musicians. Help us solidify and diversify the applied faculty with the expertise and experience to guide students, push boundaries, and create new musical genres. We also seek to eliminate lesson fees for students.

Build on our resident ensembles. Student composers will gain the opportunity to have their work performed, critical for their academic and career growth while performers engage in deep musical practice.

Invest in our students. Undergraduate scholarships and graduate fellowships give students the space to participate fully in the rigorous training and performances required by the discipline. 

Keep music facilities state-of-the-art. From the Music Recital Hall to practice rooms, from the Gamelan Room to the Electronic Arts Studio, students have unprecedented access to award-winning acoustic spaces in which to create, practice and perform. We invite your support to continue upgrading these spaces. 

Learn more: 
Arts Development
artsdev@ucsc.edu

Last modified: Sep 11, 2024