Graduate study in musicology at UCLA immerses you in the leading topics and discussions of the discipline.  The program also provides rich opportunities for developing teaching skills, participating in research assistantships, and working on graduate student–run projects.  In particular, the Musicology Graduate Students Association runs the Distinguished Lecture Series and ECHO: a music–centered journal.  A fully peer–reviewed journal, ECHO publishes twice annually using the expressive possibilities of the Internet as its forum for musical discussion, and each year the Distinguished Lecture Series invites several noted scholars from a variety of specializations for one–hour lectures and discussion. Many graduate students also participate in Musica Humana, the departmental Early Music collective that puts on several concerts each year in the Powell Library Rotunda.

The graduate program in the department usually has about 25–30 students. The program strives to maintain a balance between helping students acquire general knowledge in music history and assisting them as they develop specialized areas of research. Recent Ph.D.s have secured teaching positions at institutions such as Yale, Rutgers, Brandeis, Stanford, The University of South Florida, Dartmouth, University of Nevada–Reno, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Several students in the Department have recently attracted prestigious external recognition, including the AMS-50, Mellon, Fulbright and Jacob Javits Fellowships, as well as Ingolf Dahl awards (for best student paper in the California chapters of the American Musicological Society). In the past decade, UCLA graduate students have published in several peer-reviewed journals including Journal of American Musicology, Popular Music, Popular Music and Society, Yale Journal of Criticism, New Sound and American Music.

Our students have succeeded in acquiring highly competitive fellowships from within the university: Musicology students won the UCLA College Award for Outstanding Graduate Student in 1996, 1997, and 2004, and the distinguished Collegium of University Teaching Fellowship for the past eight years. In 2004 and 2006, a Musicology graduate student was awarded the prestigious UCLA Academic Senate Committee on Teaching Distinguished Teaching Assistant Award.

The department sets aside funds to send students to deliver papers at conferences, and it awards its own annual prizes, the Speroni Fellowship (for an outstanding seminar paper), The Mary Bianco Fellowship (for best dissertation chapter), and the Professor Ciro Zoppo Graduate Student Award (for an outstanding research proposal). These incentive programs have the effect of giving professional encouragement to those who win and raising the general quality of work in the department as a whole.