Occidental College Department of Music

As the only liberal arts college in the heart of Los Angeles, Oxy gives you unparalleled access to the world’s most vibrant musical scene, where some of the most diverse and exciting music is being made. You will work side-by-side with our faculty of professional musicians and scholars to explore, experiment, create, and communicate. Oxy’s Music Department is a community that values and cultivates the creation, performance, and critical study of the world’s music. We believe that music is best studied in the context of the liberal arts, and aspire for our students to become well-rounded scholar-musicians. By majoring in music, you will develop an integrated understanding of music as creative work, cultural and historical expression, and performance. Through the rigorous study of composition, performance, music production, popular and vernacular music, conducting, music theory, musicianship, and music history, you will acquire a complete set of skills that you can apply to your own area of musical expertise. Run a recording session in our new production center. Sing in the chorus of a local opera production. Compose new music for your friends’ chamber ensembles. DJ for the campus radio station and produce live sets on the quad. Work with a faculty mentor on a summer research project. Pursue an internship through our partnership with the Grammy Museum. Study an instrument with our world-class faculty, who are active professionals ranging from recording artists to members of the L.A. Philharmonic. Thanks to the quality, breadth, and depth of Oxy’s liberal arts curriculum, majoring in music enables you to pursue music professionally or begin a career in a wide variety of other fields. Our alumni have gone on to careers in conducting, orchestral performance, film composing, music publishing, arts management, music education, and singing, as well as in the fields of medicine, geology, classics and law.