Students may pursue a Bachelor of Music degree in the following majors: Composition, Contemporary Urban and Popular Music, and Performance. All Bachelor of Music candidates must apply to and be accepted into this degree program in the Music Department.

The BMus in Composition includes a series of sequential courses designed to address skills specific to composers and to achieve fluency in the use of tools needed by a professional musician. The program focuses extensively on 20th- and 21st-century compositional techniques, with a special focus on methods utilized by concert music composers since 1970.

With four levels of composition courses followed by private lessons in composition, the composition major sequence provides students with intensive training in the use of techniques and procedures to develop original compositions from concept to finished product. Students work with a variety of media, styles, and forms and apply the concepts learned in class to particular compositions.?

As part of their class work, students compose music in all main genres and styles of vocal, instrumental, and electronic music for public performance. Student composers are encouraged and facilitated in collaborating with students in film, dance, theatre, and other departments of Columbia College Chicago in creating film scores, music for dance and theatre performances, and other mixed media projects. Two levels of orchestration and two of counterpoint supplement the requirements for the Bachelor of Music in Composition.