Go beyond your graduate education and professional experience by honing your technique and musicianship while increasing the depth of your jazz knowledge. This highly individualized diploma can be completed in just two semesters while you immerse yourself in the Greenwich Village jazz community and prepare for the vast number of professional performance opportunities available to you in New York City.
Degree Details
Official Degree Title
Advanced Diploma: Jazz Instrumental Performance
Format
Full-time
Credits
18
Start Date
Spring
Application Deadline
Start Date
Fall
Application Deadline
While developing your technique and musicianship, you will be mentored by world-renowned jazz faculty who are at the top of their fields. You’ll also enjoy training in jazz improvisation and composition and diverse performance and recording opportunities.
Your curriculum offers plenty of opportunities for you to refine your craft. You’ll delve into jazz arranging, improvisation, and composition, and learn from seminal jazz artists from around the world in weekly interviews, podcasts, and discussions. In addition, you’ll practice and perform in a variety of jazz styles with your peers, directed by New York's leading jazz artists.
Through your professors, you’ll have access to a powerful professional network of active musicians, entrepreneurs, and composers, opening career opportunities to you before and well after graduation.
Our graduate students regularly obtain potential job offers at The Blue Note Jazz Club, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Saturday Night Live. Additionally, our Jazz Studies graduates have been hired to work with iconic jazz performers including John Scofield, Kenny Werner, Richard Bona, Taylor Swift, Lenny White, Ron McClure, Mike Richmond, Andy Milne, Combo Nuvo, and Brad Shepik, to name a few.
Deepen your musicianship and your professional knowledge in just one year of full-time study with the Artist Diploma in Jazz Instrumental Performance or the Artist Diploma in Classical Instrumental Performance, which offers four focus areas:
- Brass Studies
- Percussion Studies
- String Studies
- Woodwind Studies
“The Artist Diploma (AD) is a great opportunity to polish one’s technique after earning an MM,” says Cyrus Beroukhim, music associate professor of string studies. “Many of our students are already actively performing and teaching. You’ll have a flexible curriculum of private lessons and performance classes, plus you’ll play in ensembles and present a final degree recital.”
Hannah Cohen (MM ’21) elected to pursue her Artist Diploma in Violin Performance (String Studies) so she could develop technical mastery through intense one-on-one coaching, with a single year's commitment.
“With the AD, I felt like I had the opportunity to get even more knowledge out of the teachers I was studying with in my master’s,” says Cohen, who is now a sought-after violinist in New York City, working as a freelance performer as well as playing for world-class performing organizations such as the American Ballet Theatre. “If I had tried to go straight from my master’s to working as a professional performer, my technique wouldn’t have been on the same level. Plus, it’s all performance work instead of more theory-based courses, so I was able to work through some kinks in my technique and ultimately transition more easily from the academic world to the professional one.”
When not performing on the New York concert scene, Cohen is engaged with her community, teaching students at City Strings and Piano.
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