The department's mission is to offer undergraduate students an intellectual and artistic environment that enables them to understand and appreciate music both as art forms and as reflections of their deeper cultural contexts. We train music teachers, performers, theorists, composers, and music historians, but also provide aesthetic insight and practical experiences to those for whom music will be a lifelong avocation. Through collaboration between faculty and students, the department fosters the transmission of knowledge of the discipline through applied, theoretical, and historical study of music, especially as one discipline informs and enriches the other. We serve the university and its constituencies as a resource for artistic expression, by providing public performances by students and faculty, providing music for university ceremonies, and by acting as consultants and mentors to musicians in the community.