The Graduate Instrumental Arts Program curriculum is divided into three core components: Performance Studies, Academic Studies, and Practical Studies. Through coursework in music theory and music history, performance experience in chamber music and orchestra, and a unique seminar focusing on career building and recital program development, graduates of the Instrumental Arts Program are equipped with the skills needed to pursue a life in music in the 21st century.

Curriculum Structure

  • A performer looking serious and gesturing slightly with their hands.
    Performance Studies
    The curriculum of the Instrumental Arts Program is anchored in performance. All students receive weekly private instruction from the Conservatory’s world-class faculty, participate in Bard Conservatory’s robust chamber music program, which includes a weekly coaching and end of semester performance, and the Bard Conservatory Orchestra, which rehearses and performs in the Fisher Center at Bard. 
  • Several students having a discussion with a professor sitting out of frame.
    Academic Studies
    The Conservatory Graduate Seminar is a four-semester academic sequence focused on topics in Music History and Music Theory. Emphasizing the development of research and academic writing skills, the graduate seminar explores the relationship between a work’s musical structure—that is, how it is constructed to achieve internal coherence—and its broader historical, political, cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic contexts.
    The seminar covers a wide range of historical periods and musical styles, with particular emphasis on music of the 20th and 21st centuries.
  • A professor in a bright red shirt gesturing as she explains something.
    Practical Studies
    This weekly practicum, unique to Bard Conservatory, develops students’ performance and career building skills. Primarily performance focused, this class also includes training in program design and creation, program-note writing, personal marketing, personal website creation, and public speaking and presentation skills.

Course Descriptions

These are the courses currently offered in IAP.

  • Graduate Music History I: Classical and Romantic Music Literature: History, Repertoire, and Style
    This course will focus on a selection of works from the late 18th and 19th centuries. Each week we will concentrate on a particular composer and piece(s). We will place the compositions within a larger musical, historical, biographical, and cultural context. To facilitate this study, many of the works chosen for consideration have an accompanying musical handbook published by Cambridge University Press, as well as other supplementary materials. 
  • Graduate Music History II: Research, Writing, Criticism, and Curating
    This seminar addresses two related areas: 1) the development of research and writing skills; 2) the exploration of issues of music criticism and thematic programming for concerts and festivals. This course will examine the programs of various presenting organizations with a particular emphasis on the American Symphony Orchestra and the Bard Music Festival. The seminar further considers broader issues in the classical musical culture of our time, including the so-called Death of Classical Music.
  • Graduate Music Theory I: Musical Form and Analysis
    This course examines common-practice Western art music from the Baroque and Classical eras from two perspectives: formal analysis, which explores the way each piece of music is constructed and divided into sections, and structural analysis, which examines its harmonic and contrapuntal organization. Presented in three parts, this course begins with the rise of instrumental music in the Baroque era through close examination of five sonata-form movements.
  • Graduate Music Theory II: Analysis of 20th- Century Modernism 
    In this course students analyze some of the formative works of 20th-century musical modernism, and learn techniques for analyzing 20th-century music in general. Unlike 18th- and 19th-century music, 20th-century music is highly contextual, and no particular method of analysis will apply to every example; techniques learned for earlier music, particularly Roman Numeral analysis, will rarely be of much use here. In each case, students will deduce what kind of analysis is appropriate by looking for both small- and large-scale patterns. 
  • Graduate Performance Studies Seminar
    The Graduate Performance Studies Seminar meets for two hours each week in the Conservatory Performance Space. In this class students prepare on and off-campus recitals through regular performances, with feedback from faculty and student colleagues. In this course, students also develop skills in recital program design and creation, program-note writing, personal marketing, personal website creation, and public speaking and presentation skills.
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