BFA: Experimental Pop
The Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts
Experimental Pop Showcase at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, 2024.
Shake up the industry
CalArts’ BFA program in Experimental Pop (or ExPop, as we affectionately call it) doesn’t mold students to fit “the industry.” It prepares them to shake it up. 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.
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.
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.
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.
Meet the faculty
At CalArts, faculty and students are collaborators, teaching, learning, and working together as members of our community of artists.
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School of Music;
Director, Experimental Pop;
Mel Powell Chair in MusicImage
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School of Music;
Faculty, Composition and Experimental Sound PracticesEmail address: lhalo@calarts.eduImage
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School of Music;
Faculty, Experimental PopImage
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School of Music;
Faculty, Experimental PopEmail address: ericketts@calarts.eduImage
Gallery
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.
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Want to learn more?
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