At BU School of Music, research matters!

As artist-educators, we actively engage the world of the mind as we approach and create new pieces of art, as we curate historical and contemporary compositions, as we teach and model pedagogy, and as we produce fresh and innovative scholarship.

Our research productivity underscores that we are creative thinkers—we are involved in cutting-edge publications, we produce award-winning recordings, we concertize on the world’s leading stages, we edit top-tier journals, we compose works for great artists, and we are leaders in our academic disciplines.

Our students are prepared to launch into this world of ideas with their research, whether a dissertation, a thesis, a recital, a capstone project, paper, composition, or teaching observations.

In the School of Music, we believe that music is a process of engagement in which we invest as thinkers, makers, and doers. For us, research matters simply because… music matters!

Research Centers

Boston University School of Music is home to three major research centers. These specialized areas conduct research related to specific areas of music, contribute to the academic discourse on these topics, and host events and conferences.

Center for Beethoven Research

Center for Early Music

Center for New Music


The Impact of Our Research

Fineberg Berlin

Fineberg, New Music, and Berlin

“Berlin is a crucial place for my cross-genre artistic work. Many of my current and future projects have a strong Berlin focus,” explains Joshua Fineberg, Professor and Director of BU Center of New Music and Brain City Ambassador.

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Performance Anxiety Strategies

The music education research of Karin S. Hendricks, Associate Professor, and Tawnya D. Smith, Assistant Professor, guides approaches to the most current solutions and therapies for anxiety, as well as educational applications, for both individual and classroom use.

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book

Rites, Rights and Rhythms

Winner of the 2020 Ruth Stone Book Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology, Assoc. Prof. Michael Birenbaum Quintero’s Rites, Rights and Rhythms: A Genealogy of Musical Meaning in Colombia’s Black Pacific, examines the feedback, interference, and overlap between different experiences of currulao music.

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Expanding Drum Kit Studies

Despite their central role in many forms of music-making, drummers have been largely neglected in the scholarly literature on music and education. Assistant Professor Gareth Dylan Smith widens the field of drum kit study with publications and the International Drum Kit Studies Conference.

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