Music is a significant part of campus life at Bates. Every year hundreds of students take music courses, study vocal and instrumental performance privately for academic credit, and participate in our choirs, orchestra, jazz band, jazz combos, chamber ensembles, steel pan orchestra, and Indonesian gamelan. On balance, musical life at Bates is richer than at almost any other liberal arts college in the East.

Concentrations in performance, composition, musicology, and ethnomusicology are available. We are small enough to be able to give all our students a lot of individual attention as they pursue their particular interests, and our departmental philosophy is that we are interested in all the global varieties of human musical expression.