By design, our graduate program is small, matriculating at most two or three masters and doctoral students each year. Our small numbers make for a high degree of interaction between faculty and graduate students, who also work with us as teaching assistants in the undergraduate curriculum. The course requirements for both the MA and PHD are flexible and loosely drawn, allowing graduate students to tailor the degree to their own musical and intellectual interests. Although there is a core curriculum for both degrees - two semesters of the history of music theory, one semester of Schenker, and one semester of post-tonal music theory - students are encouraged to take seminars and classes with our ethno/musicological colleagues, and in other departments, in effect giving them leave to construct their own curricula. Our seminars are determined by the interests of both faculty and students, and in recent years have included such topics as the role of diagrams in music theory, Debussy and Bergson, recent developments electroacoustic and computer music, the string quartets of Bartok, and the writings of David Lewin. We also offer instruction on a collaborative basis, allowing students to focus even more intensively on their own musical and music-theoretical interests. What holds the graduate curriculum together is a strong cultural and critical focus, an interest in situating both music and thought about it among the various historical and discursive practices in which it is embedded. In all of these courses, one of our main concerns is to help our graduate students to develop as writers. In the masters program, the emphasis is on writing papers students will submit in support of applications to PHD programs, either here or elsewhere. In the PHD program, the emphasis is on nurturing the skills needed to research and write a dissertation. In both curricula, however, the principal question is the same: What does it mean to write creatively and engagingly about music