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USC Thorton School of Music offers first US popular music degree
The USC Thornton School of Music will introduce a new Popular Music Performance major in Fall 2009, providing the next generation of professional musicians with an undergraduate degree program in which to develop their talents.
"Colleges and universities have been talking about the need for a quality program of this kind for decades," said USC Thornton Dean Robert Cutietta. "We have built the reputation of the Thornton School by focusing on artistic quality, not style of music. I am proud that we are on the cutting edge of offering a program at the highest artistic and academic levels that have made our school famous."
Several years in the making, the Bachelor of Music in Popular Music Performance required building an entirely new curriculum from the ground up, according to Chris Sampson, USC Thornton songwriting faculty and director of the new program. It is the first university program to eschew the euphemisms "contemporary music" or "American vernacular" to describe popular music.
"People are not listening to music in genre-specific ways," Sampson says, noting that the same iPod will frequently contain classical music, jazz, rock and Top 10 hits. "We need to train musicians differently."...
"Why shouldn't a program like this start in Los Angeles?" said Robert Cutietta. "I've been a higher education professor for 20-some years and it's been talked about, but everyone has been afraid to do it. No one wanted to be first," he told the Los Angeles Times.
USC Thornton, named one of the top five music schools in the country by Rolling Stone, plans to accept no more than 20 Popular Music students for the incoming undergraduate class, with applications due in early December.
source: usc.edu
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