Music Composition
About Studying Music Composition
In our Music Composition studio, you’ll study alongside a variety of students with different backgrounds and musical interests. We’ll help you find and develop your own creative voice as a composer. Our experienced faculty have premiered works at festivals and concerts all over the United States, Europe, South Africa, Australia and Asia.
Build a strong musical foundation and find your creative voice with our Bachelor of Music in Composition degree. Ready to dig deeper? Our Master of Music and Doctor of Arts degrees will enhance your compositional skills and push you academically to prepare you for the next level of your career. You can specialize in Classical or Jazz Composition at the graduate level.
Degree Programs
Get hands-on performance experience.
- UNCommon Ensemble
- Latin Beat Ensemble
- Jazz Lab Bands
- UNC Symphony Orchestra
- Spectrum Studio Orchestra
- UNC Choirs
- Opera Theatre
- Solo Recitals & Chamber Music
Apply to this Program See Audition Requirements Music Ensembles
Explore Your Musical Voice
You’ll experience the Open Space Festival of New Music, our annual event that showcases cutting-edge new music. Renowned guest artists join our student and faculty composers and performers for a series of workshops and concerts.
The Foundry is a free series of arts entrepreneurship workshops and talks on portfolio building, resume and cover letter writing, branding, self-promotion and marketing, contracts and more! You’ll get to hear from Center for Arts Entrepreneurship Distinguished Speakers and UNC faculty and staff.
You’ll have the chance to be a part of a few professional conferences for music history and music theory organizations that we help host or organize. The School of Music has ties to the Rocky Mountain Society for Music Theory, American Musicological Society (Rocky Mountain Chapter) and International Symposium on Musical Topics and Topic Theory.
Our Composition Faculty
Ludek Drizhal
Associate Professor of Digital Media Composition and Music Theory
Dylan Fixmer
Adjunct Faculty, Music Composition
Reiner Krämer
Associate Professor of Music Theory
Drew Zaremba
Associate Professor of Music & Jazz Composition