Visual & Performing Arts

Program Description

Juilliard Jazz

		Program Description Program Overview Get Free Info Web Site Visit Email a Friend

The Juilliard School, located at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center, represents more than 100 years of the finest performing arts education in North America. Each year, Juilliard presents more than 700 performances in dance, drama, and music. Juilliard’s central mission is to educate talented performing musicians, dancers, and actors so that they may achieve the highest artistic standards as well as become leaders in their professions.

The Dance Division, founded in 1951, aims to create true contemporary dancers—trained equally in classical ballet and modern dance. The Dance Division’s four-year course of study offers students the choice of pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree or a diploma. In addition to daily technique classes, dancers refine their skills in focused study of repertory, pas de deux, pointe or men’s class, dance composition, anatomy, acting, dance history, stagecraft, production, music theory, and elements of performing. The dancers work in an enormous variety of repertory styles and techniques. Also offered are electives such as voice, tap, and jazz. All dancers have the opportunity to work with living choreographers on newly commissioned works, established repertory, and their own compositions.

Since 1968, the Drama Division has become one of the most respected training programs for actors in the English-speaking world. The classical theater training program offers students the choice of pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree or a diploma. Each of the drama classes, numbering around 18 students, moves as a group through the four years of the program, whose major emphasis is on dramatic interpretation—the students’ ability to bring their bodies and voices into harmony with the characters being portrayed. The training integrates the whole artist—voice, body, mind, and emotion—to become characters from any tradition, classical to contemporary. Actors refine the tools of their craft in acting, Alexander technique, comedy, mask, music, singing, and speech classes. Acting classes and rehearsal projects focus on the styles, conventions, and inner worlds of plays. Students learn and explore how they may transform their total selves into living characters in those worlds. All the hard work and excitement culminate in the fourth year, as students again act in four full-scale productions in different styles.

The Drama Division also offers a one-year, tuition-free, graduate-level playwriting program. The Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program, under the direction of Christopher Durang and Marsha Norman, encourages and aids the development of new and diverse voices in the American theater.

The Music Division offers a four-year undergraduate program leading to a Bachelor of Music degree, or a three year diploma program. Graduate-level degree programs lead to the Master of Music or Doctor of Musical Arts degrees. Graduate-level programs concentrating exclusively on performance include the graduate diploma and the artist diploma. With individualized instruction from members of a superb faculty and with continual performance opportunities at the school, around the city, the country, and the world, Juilliard helps its music students transform their passions and skills into artistic maturity. Students of orchestral instruments have ample opportunities to play in large ensembles, including the Juilliard Orchestra. Juilliard ensembles perform at the finest venues in New York: Alice Tully Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, and Carnegie Hall. Those interested in twentieth and twenty-first century music can play in the New Juilliard Ensemble. The AXIOM ensemble is dedicated to performing the masterworks of the twentieth century. At any given time, some 120 separate chamber ensembles are also at work at Juilliard. Student musicians form their own groups, audition for faculty coaches, and attend weekly coaching sessions that culminate each semester in performances around the building and beyond.

The Vocal Arts Department offers a comprehensive training program for singers at all stages of development. In addition to private lessons, voice majors receive professional vocal coaching, a process that combines musical instruction with guidance in diction, language and text, movement, and character development. In performances for the Juilliard community and the public, vocalists explore the entire spectrum of opera and art song repertoire. The advanced Juilliard Opera Center accepts artists who have already completed their formal education and who demonstrate significant potential for careers as operatic performers. This program offers singers performance experience and an intensive course of practical study that helps provide a successful transition from an academic to a professional environment.

In 2001, Juilliard married America’s greatest indigenous art form with the same standards of training and performance set by the classical division. Juilliard now offers a four-year Jazz Studies Bachelor of Music program, as well as graduate-level Master of Music, graduate diploma, and artist diploma programs. Courses include jazz improvisation, jazz history, composition and arranging, harmony and counterpoint, and the business of jazz. The Jazz Studies program integrates a balanced classroom education with a well-developed performance and touring program. The Julliard Jazz Orchestra, Ensembles, students, and alumni perform regularly at local clubs such as Birdland, Triad, Swing 46, Blue Note, and Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola. The Julliard Jazz Orchestra and Ensembles have traveled internationally to locations including Costa Rica, Japan, Spain, France, Italy, and Qatar. National touring locations have included New Orleans, St. Louis, Wisconsin, South Carolina, and Utah.

Aspiring artists in all divisions obtain an education that is truly unique, with a long-standing tradition of excellence that is reflected in the achievements of alumni; a world-class faculty; an institution based in New York City at Lincoln Center, with contacts in the performing arts all around the city, the nation, and the world; and an institutional philosophy that nurtures the complete artist and the complete human being.

Application Procedures

Deadline--freshmen: December 1. Notification date--freshmen: April 1. Required: essay, high school transcript, college transcript(s) for transfer students, letter of recommendation, audition, pre-audition audio performance tape, TOEFL for all students for whom English is not a native language. Auditions held 1 time on campus.

Undergraduate Contact

Ms. Lee Cioppa, Associate Dean for Admissions, The Juilliard School, 60 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, New York 10023-6588; 212-799-5000 ext. 223, fax: 212-769-6420.