About the Blair School of Music

The Blair School focuses on the personal and professional education of highly talented young musicians who demonstrate an exceptional capacity and motivation to shape our increasingly diverse and complex global century —through music, with music and in music.

Our unique "Blair Experience" builds on the very foundation of methods, repertories and ensembles shared by the world's most competitive schools of music and conservatories but goes well beyond that, immersing students in the transformative spaces of a world-class research university committed to inclusive excellence with distinction in areas ranging from theology to science, arts to engineering, humanities to business, and education to law.

Graduates of the Blair School are recognized as superior artists and scholars distinguished by their global mindsets, broad interdisciplinary competencies, and unyielding commitments to advocacy, entrepreneurship and education.

Our Mission Statement

The Blair School of Music serves as the focal point within Vanderbilt University for the study of music as a human endeavor and as a performing art. Music offers to all persons a medium for the expression of the human spirit. Accordingly, the Blair School of Music addresses music through a broad array of academic, pedagogical and performing activities. Consistent with the mission of Vanderbilt University, the School maintains and promotes the highest standards in the pursuit of scholarly and creative work, in the delivery of instruction, and in the promotion of professional and public service.

In its scholarly and creative work, the Blair School of Music proposes to advance the discovery of knowledge, to expand the horizons of musical expression, to promote academic excellence, and to sustain an environment supporting these pursuits by faculty and students.

Pedagogically, the Blair School is committed to providing superior musical instruction to children, youth and adult students via the Blair Academy; stimulating classroom and studio instruction to collegiate music majors and minors; and, to the students of Vanderbilt University at large, an array of academically rigorous, culturally enriching courses appropriate to one of the nations' leading institutions of higher learning.

In its commitment to professional and public service, the Blair School of Music contributes to cultural and intellectual life at Vanderbilt University and throughout the region through concerts, lectures, and recitals by faculty and students, and by providing a forum for visiting artists, scholars, and composers of national stature.