Within The Oxy Campaign For Good, our goal is to support Oxy’s Music Department and affirm Occidental College as a premiere institution for preparing students to pursue lives of artistic expression and leadership throughout the creative economy and beyond.
Through the Campaign, we seek investments to position Oxy’s Music Department as not only one of the best music programs at a liberal arts college, but one of the best in the country. Through your partnership, we will enhance programmatic flexibility and technical capacity for our faculty and students, create essential new performance, teaching and learning spaces, and fully leverage Oxy’s location in Los Angeles.
How Oxy’s Music Department Prepares Leaders for the Creative Economy
Reimagined for the Future
Since 1888, the Music Department has featured a curriculum with a breadth of musical genres and styles. Today, Music honors Oxy’s performing arts tradition by reimagining a top-drawer program and expanding our offerings to include music production, film scoring, songwriting, music business, and audio engineering—all taught with critical and creative rigor. This fresh vision and reshaping helped garner praise from Billboard Magazine, who recently named Oxy’s Music program one of the best in the country.
Learn more about what makes Oxy’s Music program unique
The Liberal Arts Advantage
The Music curriculm at Oxy is vast, embracing theory, history, and performance as well as composition, popular music, instrumental activities, and production—giving students the fundamentals needed to pursue music professionally or to succeed in innumerable other fields. Oxy provides its music students with a personalized, interdisciplinary liberal arts education, all within the context of a diverse and talented student body.
Read more about the benefits of studying Music at Oxy
A Distinct App
roach
Oxy’s approach is distinct from large universities with graduate programs, where undergraduates receive limited faculty attention, and music conservatories that specialize in deep practice training and applied skills. Occidental’s approach sets our graduates apart and ahead, preparing them for success in today’s increasingly complex world.
Listen to original music compositions by Oxy students
Access to Los Angeles
As the only small liberal arts college in L.A., Oxy provides an industry-caliber music program for undergraduates like no other institution can. Students have access to world-class musicians, including instructors who play with the L.A. Philharmonic and regularly perform world premieres. As the industry moves west to L.A., including Sony and Warner Music, students will have more networking and internship opportunities.
Learn more about how music industry leaders connect with Oxy
Collaborations Across Disciplines
The College is also exploring ways to enhance synergies between the Music, Media Arts & Culture (MAC), and Computer Science departments. These programs share many students, and faculty cross-teach courses in each other’s departments, such as "Introduction to Film Scoring," which examines the intersection of film and music. We also seek to engage with industry partners in L.A., to provide additional, hands-on experience for our students, and to build mutually beneficial relationships with leading creative organizations.
Read more about "Introduction to Film Scoring"
Our Outstanding Faculty
Experts in all fields of music, Oxy faculty members and instructors have chosen to be a part of the Occidental music community because of the vision and aspirations of our program. Our esteemed faculty include an Emmy award-winning and Grammy® Award-nominated composer, a multi-ASCAP winner for innovative orchestra programming, and our beloved conductor of the 115-year old Glee Club.