BILGI Music

The Department of Music was founded in 1997 to provide jazz education and was a place where talented young people of Turkey met the masters of jazz. Many masters of today’s music scene were educated in this school. Following a series of changes from 2005 onwards, a more inclusive curriculum was created, embracing all genres and areas. In its new form, the department became a place where the disciplines of composition and sound technologies merged, and where musicians who could approach music with this perspective without distinguishing genres were trained. Continuing its change by keeping up with what time brings, the department has the distinction of being a place where students and teachers who understand the discipline of work and the importance of free thought in the creation process of artistic creation and share learning activities as multifaceted and multi-layered experiences.

As the Department of Music, we see music as a way of living, thinking, and communicating, as opposed to a culture in which music -along with many other things- is treated purely as an object of consumption. We strive to discover what the past and today present, to comprehend and produce through a critical filter. Above all, we prepare our students for professional life with an approach that encourages them to find their own identities, and their own unique artistic languages as musicians.

Composition and Music Technology Undergraduate Program

Our Undergraduate Program has a curriculum that aims its students to graduate as individuals who are active, creative, open to interaction and collaboration; and who understand and develop the environment they live in.

In the first two years, the students go through a very intensive period of entry-level ear training, theory, music history, philosophy of music, and composition classes. In the third year, the required classes are fewer, and students are encouraged to take elective classes from all of the programs in the university and to design their own education.

We remain constantly active at an international level through exchange programs, bilateral exchange agreements, seminars, workshops, and concerts with the participation of guests from abroad.
Graduates from the Istanbul Bilgi University Music Undergraduate Program
• are aware of and efficient with the most up-to-date sound technologies;
• are creating and developing in all areas where sound and technology meet;
• are not just users of technology, but are also individuals who think about and develop new fields of interaction and performance; and
• are efficient in every step of the process of music creation but also able to speak about those steps before the creation and after the performance.
In short, they are individuals who conceive and design the entire life as a performance space, individuals who think with music.

Thus, Istanbul Bilgi University Music Undergraduate Program’s graduates;
• can become contemporary music, electroacoustic music composers;
• they can create and perform the music that they want with more sophisticated resources;
• they can work as a sound engineer, music producer, and sound designers in the digital environment;
• they can make careers as critics, managers, and publishers within the music industry;
• they can work in film music, TV music, or jingle production;
• they can design sound installations, interdisciplinary applications, and interactive works of art; or
• they can be music educators as well as take on music as an academic career.