UCC's Department of Music is committed to the cultivation -- through creativity in teaching, research, composition and performance -- of a dynamic learning community dedicated to an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural understanding of music. The Department has long been known as a centre of excellence for both the study and the practice of music. Since the 1980s it has undergone expansion and modernization in several important respects: the broadening of its undergraduate curriculum to encompass potentially all types of music as objects of study; the adoption of an approach to teaching and learning that is not narrowly vocational but which provides students with eminently practical experience of scholarship and creativity (composition and performance); and the expansion of postgraduate studies. Today the Department is more active, delivering many more programmes and public events, than at any time in its history.