Benjamin T. Rome School of Music

About Us

As Washington, D.C.'s finest university school of music, the Benjamin T. Rome School of Music offers students distinct advantages — a distinguished faculty, individual attention, performance opportunities,and proximity to Washington's excellent cultural and research institutions.

Our undergraduate program leads to the Bachelor of Music degree and emphasizes academic and creative development.

Undergraduate degree programs include composition, music education, musical theatre, or performance (orchestral instruments, organ, piano or voice). Academically gifted students may also qualify for the Honors Program in Music History and Literature.

Graduate programs lead to the degrees of Master of Arts (musicology), Master of Arts and Master of Science in Library Science (joint degree), Master of Music in Sacred Music, Master of Music (composition, Orchestral conducting, performance, pedagogy), Doctor of Musical Arts (composition, sacred music, orchestral instruments, piano, vocal accompanying or chamber music, voice), and Doctor of Philosophy (music history, music theory).

Students study with an outstanding full-time faculty of artists and scholars and an extensive part-time faculty. Many students study applied music with faculty who are first-chair players with major professional performing organizations, such as the National Symphony Orchestra and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Internationally known artists come to campus throughout the year to present concerts and hold master classes.

The Benjamin T. Rome School of Music presents more than 200 performances annually, ranging from solo recitals to opera. Students have presented concerts in Rome and at the Vatican for Pope John Paul II, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, at Washington's Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and in major U.S. cities.

The CUA Department of Drama offers music majors the opportunity to enroll in drama courses and perform in theater productions.

Our students use the university's music library and the music holdings of the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution. Students benefit from teaching by scholars whose research includes Gregorian chant, medieval music, 19th-century band instruments, piano music, chamber music, Latin American music and pedagogy of all periods.

Graduates of the Benjamin T. Rome School of Music work as performers, music educators, composers, music administrators and liturgical musicians. Many CUA-trained singers have been finalists in the Metropolitan Opera National Auditions or sing principal roles with the Met and other major international opera houses.

CUA's performance of Defiant Requiem in Terezin, Czech Republic, 2009, using the music of Verdi's Requiem to tell the story of prisoner Raphael Schaecter and his choir of inmates at the Nazi concentration camp during WWII. The CUA Chorus was invited to perform to commemorate the end of the Czech presidency of the E.U. and to close a conference on reparations for survivors of the Holocaust.