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California Institute of the Arts

BFA: Experimental Pop

The Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts

A woman sings into a microphone while holding one arm outstretched. Light from a projector streams toward her in a darkened space.

Experimental Pop Showcase at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, 2024.  

Sonic Innovation

As a BFA ExPop student, be ready to take creative risks: to create disruptive sounds, use technology “incorrectly,” and incorporate improvisation and error into your artistic process. You’ll join a community of experimentally minded songwriters, performers, and producers who use the studio as an instrument to generate new work. You’ll receive one-on-one instruction with your mentor and other program faculty—all active producers in the Los Angeles area—to help you develop your individual approach to self-production.  

A four-person band plays on a pink-lit stage in a nightclub. The name of the club, Troubadour, is spelled out in blue neon behind them.

Experimental Pop showcase at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, 2024. 

Creative production

BFA Experimental Pop

In an era of accelerating change across the spectrum of music, the Experimental Pop program actively embraces our students’ individual interests and practices, encouraging you to fashion your own musical path as a performer-composer-producer dedicated to making new work. Here, you’ll songwrite, perform, record, and produce original work as often as possible, fully engaging as a musical artist within the broader context of an art school setting. 

Let’s connect

Promotional image showing several gramophone-shaped Grammy awards with the words “Grammy Nominations”

It’s a sure bet you’ll see a lot of CalArtians on the list when the Recording Academy announces the Grammy nominees each year, and 2024 was no exception. 

When you join our community of artists, you’ll benefit from the program’s unique location within the only accredited arts college in the United States that gathers the full range of visual and performing arts under one roof. Collaborating with peers and studying with faculty across the Institute, you’ll have opportunities to pursue interests in dance, visual arts, critical theory, and film/video production, alongside the cultivation of your musical skills.

Although the primary focus of the four-year BFA curriculum is on sonic innovation, you’ll also be encouraged to explore pop as an inherently audio-visual-textual form. Experimental impulses rarely limit themselves to music alone, but manifest in promo videos and visual albums, record artwork, performance, style and costume, and even marketing, public statements, and artistic rationales—particularly as most contemporary Experimental Pop artists operate within a do-it-yourself and release-it-yourself milieu.

As such, you’ll be encouraged to think critically and conceptually about your work as a pop artist, while also cultivating professional connections with contemporary artists, recording studios, and DIY entities beyond the CalArts campus—for example, by collaborating in remote production ensembles with global pop artists from Uganda, Egypt, Japan, and Colombia, or pursuing mentor-supported internships with cooperatively run performance spaces or independent record labels in the Los Angeles area.

The BFA curriculum features a network of courses that offer core theory and skills studies, songwriting, arranging, rock and pop history, recording, producing, and individual lessons. Your faculty will encourage you to add classes in non-Western music, experimental composition, and music technology (taught by faculty who are leaders in those fields) in order to broaden the creative and technical reach of your individual musical voice.

Beginning on day one and continuing throughout your residency, you’ll develop and build a cumulative portfolio of creative work in close collaboration with your faculty mentor. This portfolio is periodically reviewed, and will be evaluated and approved by faculty in your final year for you to graduate and earn the degree.  

All BFA programs in The Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts offer a broad and rigorous general musical education alongside highly individualized lesson instruction and mentoring. All undergraduate students engage in intensive shared training in musical techniques and concepts spanning classical, jazz, popular, electronic, and experimental styles, and both Western and non-Western musical cultures. You will graduate with experience in creating original work, ensemble performance, music notation and theory, professional development, and artistic métiers outside of music.
 

Interested in this program?

View our step-by-step application guide to learn more.

Start your application

Admission requirements

To be considered for the BFA in Experimental Pop, you must complete an application and all program-specific requirements, including a portfolio representative of your work, an artist statement, a brief video introduction, and two letters of recommendation. Before applying, please familiarize yourself with the detailed application requirements and resources available to assist you in this important process. 

View application requirements

Degree requirements

Each CalArts music student designs their course of study in collaboration with a faculty mentor, with the first two BFA years focused on building a strong foundation in music theory, performance, and diverse musical cultures, and the final two years dedicated to personalized exploration through specialized concentrations, creative projects, and individualized mentorship.

BFA Experimental Pop academic requirements

In addition to work in your specific program, all undergraduate students must complete requirements in general education, which we call Critical Studies. This liberal arts curriculum is designed to enable students to consider aesthetic questions within larger socio-cultural, ethical, and political contexts.  

Critical Studies requirements

Minors and interdisciplinary opportunities

CalArts offers students the chance to pursue additional interests alongside your chosen discipline, such as a minor in Music Theory, Digital Arts, or Arts Education.

Learn more about minors and interdisciplinary opportunities 

Courses you might take

What courses would you take as a BFA Experimental Pop student? Browse the courses offered in the School of Music, including opportunities to study jazz, world music, experimental pop, film scoring, improvisation, electronic music, composition, vocal performance, African and Balinese ensembles, and much more.

School of Music courses

Meet the faculty

At CalArts, faculty and students are collaborators, teaching, learning, and working together as members of our community of artists.

Gallery

Some of our alumni

  • Benjamin Wynn (Deru): Emmy Award-winning composer, sound designer, electronic music producer
  • Greg Kurstin (BFA 92): record producer, instrumentalist
  • Zachary Ilya Ezrin (Imperial Triumphant): guitarist
  • John Maus: composer, singer, songwriter
  • Julia Holter: singer-songwriter, record producer, composer, artist, academic
  • Kristin Erickson (Kevin Blechdom): electronic musician, performance artist
  • Roger Miller (Mission of Burma): singer, songwriter, guitarist, fiddler, drummer, Broadway composer

More School of Music alumni

Julia Holter Embraces the Corporeal

Alumni Stories

Ever-shifting orchestration envelops shards of meditative lyrical fragments in Something in the Room She Moves, the sixth studio album by composer, singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and CalArts alum Julia Holter.

School of Music Events

See all School of Music events

Want to learn more?

We got you. Our Admissions team is all about providing the information you need to decide if CalArts is right for you. We’re excited to connect with you for a tour of our legendary campus, a virtual info session, or at one of our admissions events across the country or around the world. Take the next step—we’re here to help.