Fredonia’s undergraduate composition program prepares you to pursue professional and academic careers in music composition and related fields. Being one of the strongest centers of new music in western New York for over 40 years, we encourage the exploration of your own musical voice while learning the art and craft of composing, songwriting, arranging, orchestrating, and creating. Our Music Composition courses offer instruction without a stylistic agenda; each student composer follows their own artistic direction while developing professionally competitive musical skills.
The Fredonia Difference
Fredonia’s unique approach of collaborative integration across campus gives you the chance to work with artists from many different disciplines. You will collaborate with choreographers, filmmakers, theatre directors, and poets as well as singers, instrumentalists, recording engineers, and burgeoning educators.
As a music composition major, you will take private lessons in composition in addition to your instrumental/vocal studies, attend our weekly Composition Forum, and take courses in beginning composition, instrumentation, orchestration, choral arranging, composing for electronic media, scoring for film and video games, notation, styles & genres, repertoire & analysis, and entrepreneurship, culminating in a composition recital during your senior year. We have five annual student composer concerts that are open to both composition majors and non-majors to have works performed by student performers in our award-winning Rosch Recital Hall.
