Musicologists study the history and interpretation of music. Until recently the discipline focused largely on European art-music repertories, but in the last decades it has expanded to include popular music, film music, jazz, and cultural criticism within its domain. The Department of Musicology at UCLA now leads the field nationally and internationally in offering advanced training in these newer areas of expertise.

Like the discipline as a whole, the Department of Musicology at UCLA has a long-standing tradition of specialists in Medieval and Renaissance repertories, including Emeritus Professors Gilbert Reaney, Marie Louise Göllner and Frank D'Accone. Robert Stevenson, now retired, maintains his status as the leading authority on Spanish and Latin American musics. Beginning in the 1960's, the department acquired a number of scholars of seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century music, including Murray Bradshaw (Emeritus) and Malcolm Cole (Emeritus). More recently, Elisabeth Le Guin has brought her expertise as a world-class cellist to bear on issues of eighteenth-century performance and aesthetics, particularly music as an embodied practice.

In the 1980's, the discipline of musicology extended its concerns into later periods, and the department's faculty reflect this: in addition to his work on the German Romantic symphony, Raymond Knapp has authored a two-volume work on the American Musical; Mitchell Morris, among the few American experts in Russian/Soviet repertories, has written on a wide range of late twentieth-century popular music; Robert Fink is one of the most original and thoughtful scholars now working in the intersection among musicology, music theory, and cultural studies, applying his insights to music ranging from minimalism to electronic dance music; and Robert Walser publishes extensively on American and popular music—from jazz to heavy metal—in addition to editing the journal American Music from 1997 to 2001.

During the 1990s, musicology has been transformed by the questions and methods of cultural criticism, including feminism, gay studies, narratology, and so on. Susan McClary is the figure most closely identified internationally with introducing this set of concerns (long central to the other humanities) into musicology, work for which she received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1995. Her most recent work Modal Subjectivities examines the sixteenth-century Italian madrigal. The department continues to be committed to its position within traditional historical studies, even as it is now emerging as the leading institution for musicological training in cultural studies. Our three most recent hires add new areas of specialization to the program: Tamara Levitz is a leading mind in the study of musical modernism, and her writings range from early John Cage to Yoko Ono; Elizabeth Upton's work on formes fixes chansons of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has changed how we think about and hear this music; and Timothy Taylor is a leading scholar on how the intersections of globalization, race, and technology shape the music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Through its faculty, the department is actively involved with several interdisciplinary programs at UCLA, including the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies, Center for the Study of Women, and the Program in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies. The department is also dedicated to increasing community awareness of new research in the humanities at UCLA, and members of its faculty frequently present lecture/demonstrations on various topics of interest to large audiences, in addition to delivering papers at scholarly conferences throughout the world. Various members of the faculty have won prestigious grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and the university's Luckman Award for Distinguished Teaching. In the past few years, Susan McClary delivered the 2002 UCLA Faculty Research Lecture, and Professor Emeriti Robert Stevenson was awarded the Constantine Panunzio Distinguished Emeriti Award in 2004. Prof. McClary was also the 2004-2005 Clark Professor, organizing the Clark Library's 2004-2005 lecture series Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Cultural Expression.