Music

Office: Newman Performing Arts Center 
Mail Code: 2344 E. Iliff Ave. Denver, CO 80208
Phone: 303-871-6400
Web Site: https://liberalarts.du.edu/lamont

With its wide array of degrees and certificates, outstanding faculty, and superior facilities, the Lamont School of Music is one of the most distinguished music programs in the United States.

The Lamont School of Music offers bachelor of music programs with majors in composition, jazz studies and commercial music, performance, and recording and production; a bachelor of arts in music; undergraduate minors in ethnomusicology and music; and a certificate in Suzuki cello or violin pedagogy.

The faculty is composed of professors and instructors who actively perform, compose, publish, and lecture worldwide. The Lamont School of Music is located in the Robert and Judi Newman Center for the Performing Arts, a 186,000-square-foot state-of-the-art facility opened in 2002 and officially inaugurated in 2003. The Newman Center includes an academic building, a 225-seat recital hall, a 1,000-seat concert/opera hall, and a 250-seat flexible theater. The academic building is replete with teaching studios, practice rooms (some of which are digitally enhanced as “virtual” acoustic practice rooms), large rehearsal spaces, a music library, a digital keyboard laboratory, two recording studios, an electronic music lab, classrooms with smart-to-the-seat technology, and an 80-seat recital salon.

Program Learning Outcomes

Applied Music Major

  • Demonstrate technical competence as a musician.
  • Form coherent written arguments, drawing from a broad knowledge of music and music literature.
  • Integrate musical knowledge and skills in at least one mode of musical expression (e.g. performance, scholarship, composition).

Music Studies Major

  • Produce musical knowledge and criticism through a range of genres of musical prose writing (e.g., album and live performance reviews, music journalism, scholarship, etc.).
  • Understand how music functions, now and in the past, locally and globally, in communities, cultures, and markets.
  • Create music or curate musical events through solo work or collaboration. 

Composition Major

  • Demonstrate technical competence as a composer.
  • Form coherent written arguments, drawing from a broad knowledge of music and music literature.
  • Integrate musical knowledge and skills in a culminating composition portfolio that demonstrates compositional breadth and depth.

Jazz Studies & Commercial Music Major

  • Demonstrate technical competence as a jazz/commercial musician.
  • Form coherent written arguments, drawing from a broad knowledge of music and music literature.
  • Integrate musical knowledge and skills in a culminating jazz/commercial music performing experience that demonstrates convincing interpretations of a wide range of jazz and commercial music.

Performance Major

  • Demonstrate technical competence as a performing musician.
  • Form coherent written arguments, drawing from a broad knowledge of music and music literature.
  • Integrate musical knowledge and skills in a culminating performance experience that demonstrates convincing interpretations of a wide range of music.

Recording & Production Major

  • Demonstrate technical competence as a recording engineer.
  • Form coherent written arguments, drawing from a broad knowledge of music and music literature.
  • Integrate skills and knowledge in music and engineering in a culminating recording and production project that demonstrates breadth and depth as a recording engineer.

Artist Diploma

  • Demonstrate that they can integrate their professional level of performing skills and musical artistry in three solo recitals.

Certificate in Suzuki Pedagogy

  • Demonstrate a professional level of pedagogical competence as a Suzuki teacher in either violin or cello.