Creative Musical Arts Program
Integrative development of consciousness, creativity, and craft
This program provides a new approach to musical study that enables you to develop a personal, artistic voice, capable of making a positive difference in the world.
Students can choose Creative Musical Arts either as a concentration track in the B.A. in Media & Communications, the B.A. in Art, or as a 20-credit minor.
Core faculty include top professionals in the fields of performing, composing, teaching, and music technology. Courses are taught one at a time, while lessons and ensembles are taught on the semester system. Enrollment will be limited to afford a high degree of student-faculty interaction.
Creative Musical Arts integrates 3 areas:
- Exploring diverse musical styles through a unique approach to improvisation and composition
Our faculty offer an effective, user-friendly approach to improvisation. This enables you to create with confidence and joy — whether you’ve never improvised before or whether you are an experienced improviser looking to expand your creative horizons. Confident improvisation is a central aspect of creative musical expression that helps you to:
- collaborate with musicians from diverse stylistic backgrounds
- generate ideas for compositions
- create music for videos
- enjoy playing with friends
We also provide an equally diverse approach to composition studies, starting with songwriting for everyone. As students’ skill levels progress, we will add advanced courses in:
- songwriting
- contemporary classical and jazz composition
- orchestration
- film scoring
This gives you a truly formidable set of creative tools that will allow you to fulfill your wide-ranging musical aspirations.
- Hands-on training in theory, aural skills, instrumental technique, repertoire, and more
Creative development unfolds hand-in-hand with development of skills in craft. As a successful improviser/composer you will need:
- solid instrumental technique
- strong facility with melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic practices
- excellent aural skills
MUM offers a unique kind of foundation in these areas, in which all of your skills are connected with each other and to creative application. Study of chords and harmonic progressions is grounded in keyboard realization, written work, and improvising and composing processes. Theoretical concepts are approached through the lens of multiple styles: the structure and function of the secondary dominant chord, for example, is the same in the music of Beethoven and Chopin as it is in Ellington and Monk.
By approaching all knowledge areas as richly interwoven aspects of a broad musical tapestry, the learning process becomes quite lively, which directly enhances your assimilation of skills.
- Developing your inner creative potential through Consciousness-Based education
As you explore the frontiers of creative musicianship, you also embark on an even deeper journey. This is a journey inward, beyond ordinary ways of thinking, to your innermost Self — the very source of creativity. Direct contact with the field of pure consciousness, experienced through the Transcendental Meditation technique, systematically cultivates your creative potential.
Musicians have always known that the experience of music runs deeper than the score sheet or in the instrument. It touches the silent depths of inner being and awakens the infinite field of consciousness itself. Accessing this profound reservoir of consciousness enables MUM students to bring creative, harmonious solutions to music and all fields of life.
 “There is no greater pleasure than going into the depth of oneself, setting one’s whole being in motion and seeking for new and hidden treasures.”
— Claude Debussy, French composer, 1862–1918 |
 “I improvised … Each time I leaped I seemed to touch the sky and when I regained earth it seemed to be mine alone.”
— Josephine Baker, American/French singer, dancer,
and actress, 1906–1975 |
 “If there is a spirit, music is the thing that wakes it up. And it certainly woke up mine. And it seems to be how we communicate on another level.”
— Bono, Irish musician and philanthropist, b. 1960 |
 “All a musician can do is to get closer to the sources of nature, and so feel that he is in communion with the natural laws.”
— John Coltrane, American jazz saxophonist and composer 1926–1967 |
 “Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.”
Lao Tzu, Chinese philosopher, 6th century BC |
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