Northwestern’s BM in Musicology trains scholar-musicians to explore how sounds travel, signify, and shape societies. Core seminars traverse medieval chant, Black avant-garde jazz, K-pop’s digital economies, and the politics of sound archives. Methodology courses equip students with ethnography, archival paleography, GIS mapping, and digital-humanities coding, while partnerships with Chicago histories—from blues clubs to Ukrainian Village choirs—embed research in living communities. Public-musicology labs mentor undergraduates in podcast scripting, museum-exhibit design, and policy advocacy, ensuring scholarship resonates beyond academia. Graduates excel in cultural journalism, arts administration, library science, and top MA/PhD programs, armed with critical theory, multilingual primary-source skills, and a commitment to inclusive narratives.
Create a digital map tracing gospel-train repertoire migrations during the Great Migration
Curate an online exhibit of wartime sheet-music covers analyzing gender iconography
Produce a podcast series unpacking sampling ethics in contemporary hip-hop court cases
Transcribe and translate Ottoman court songs, then stage an historically informed performance
Use sentiment analysis on concert reviews to chart reception of atonal music 1908-1938
Design an interactive timeline of synthesizer technology evolution with audio demos
Conduct oral-history interviews with Chicago house-music pioneers and build a searchable archive
Examine colonial power dynamics in field-recording expeditions via critical organology
Write a grant proposal to digitize endangered Indigenous songbooks and return copies to communities
Analyze streaming-platform metadata biases affecting global south artists’ discoverability
Build a GIS story-map linking protest songs to specific civil-rights march routes
Research acoustical ecologies of monastic cloisters using impulse-response recordings
Create a bilingual documentary on mariachi education programs in U.S. high schools
Assess gender disparity trends in orchestra programming using scraped season data 2000-present
Develop an open-source syllabus on disability and music for introductory courses
Host a public ‘silent disco’ lecture demonstrating sound walks as urban research method
Compare viral TikTok sea-shanty revivals to 19th-century broadside ballad networks
Publish a data-visualization dashboard of global music-copyright term lengths and reissue gaps
Analyze notation software’s impact on contemporary choral orthography via user surveys
Investigate music’s past and present—and share its stories widely—through Northwestern Musicology.
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