Composition is juried on a portfolio rather than a recital. Across your studies you build and maintain a body of work, the composition faculty review it at the end of every semester, and what you have written, alongside how the portfolio is growing, determines whether you advance. This is for undergraduate and graduate composers. Music producers have a separate guide.
Your Creative Portfolio is the collected body of work you write during your studies, kept in one organized place and updated every semester. You are not judged on a single recital. You are judged on this growing portfolio, reviewed at a jury at the end of each semester, where the faculty look at what you finished that term and at the portfolio as a whole. Those reviews decide your retention and advancement, so treat the portfolio as the center of your progress. It is also the first professional record of your work, the thing you show to ensembles, schools, and competitions after you graduate.
Two things travel with every work: a score and a recording. The portfolio also always holds a current CV and a short biography.
Each semester of applied lessons you complete two works, one more substantial than the other. The two are performed on different concerts across the year:
Two works every semester of applied lessons, one more substantial than the other. Four semesters of applied lessons means eight works.
The shorter, fall works are where you learn to get your own music played: you find the performers yourself. Some ways to line them up:
Your portfolio is built from six works, and every one of them is publicly performed and recorded:
Only the two chamber works carry a length minimum. The choir and chamber orchestra pieces may run shorter than ten minutes. Your portfolio is reviewed at the progress juries, levels 6a through 6c, where the faculty track its growth and quality. The degree ends with the level 6d capstone: about four weeks ahead, you present the capstone lecture to the composition faculty and submit the capstone paper, and once it is cleared, the lecture is scheduled as a public presentation (the capstone).
The portfolio is an archive, so its files need to last and to open cleanly on any machine the faculty use. Two formats do most of the work: PDF for anything on the page, and lossless audio for recordings.
Export every score as a PDF from your notation software (Dorico, Sibelius, Finale, MuseScore). A PDF fixes the layout, so your engraving looks the same on any screen.
When a piece is electronic and has no notated score, a short technical document takes the score's place. Write it as a PDF and include what someone would need to understand and present the work:
Think of it as the map that lets your piece be understood and reproduced without you in the room.
Save recordings in a lossless format. Lossless means the file keeps the full recording with nothing thrown away, and it comes in two kinds, both fine for the portfolio. Uncompressed lossless, WAV and AIFF, stores the raw audio at full size. Compressed lossless, FLAC and ALAC (Apple Lossless), makes the file smaller and expands it back to the exact original signal when it plays, so you save space and lose nothing. Use compressed lossless whenever you want smaller files.
What to avoid is lossy compression, MP3 and AAC, which shrinks the file by permanently discarding sound the format guesses you will not miss. That loss cannot be undone, so keep an MP3 only for casual sharing, never as the portfolio copy. Aim for at least 44.1 kHz and 16-bit, with 48 kHz and 24-bit better when your recording supports it, and export a stereo mix from your DAW.
Save your CV and your biography as PDFs too, so the formatting stays put. Keep your editable original, the Word or Pages file, so you can update it each semester and export a fresh PDF into the portfolio when you do.
A portfolio is only as useful as it is easy to open and read in order. Keep one folder for the whole portfolio, one subfolder per work, numbered so they sort in the order you want the faculty to see them. Name every file so its composer, its work, and what it is are clear from the name alone.
A workable structure:
Lastname_Firstname_Portfolio/
01_WorkTitle/
Lastname_WorkTitle_score.pdf
Lastname_WorkTitle_recording.wav
02_WorkTitle/
Lastname_WorkTitle_score.pdf
Lastname_WorkTitle_recording.wav
03_ElectronicWork/
Lastname_ElectronicWork_notes.pdf
Lastname_ElectronicWork_audio.wav
CV/
Lastname_CV.pdf
Bio/
Lastname_bio.pdf
At the end of every semester you submit your whole portfolio on Canvas as a single compressed file, a zip. Zipping bundles the entire folder into one upload and keeps your folder structure and file names intact.
Lastname_Portfolio_Fall2026.zip.Open your own zip before you upload it. Unzip it somewhere new and confirm:
A missing file, or a score that will not open, is the most common problem at submission, and testing your own copy catches it. Keep your organized folder on your own computer and backed up elsewhere too. Canvas holds what you submit each semester, and the area keeps the reviewed portfolio in its shared storage, but the copy on your own machine is the one you keep building on.
Update the portfolio as you go, not the week before the jury:
Treat the portfolio as a public document, because it becomes one. The organized, clearly labeled, well-recorded set of works that carries you through the program is what you send to ensembles, festivals, and graduate schools when you leave.