• Source: List of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia chapters

Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia (ΦΜΑ) is an American collegiate social fraternity for men with a special interest in music. The chapter is the basic unit of organization in Phi Mu Alpha. The designation of chapter has been given to at least three different kinds of organization over the history of the fraternity: collegiate, alumni, and professional. The only form currently in use, the collegiate chapter, is defined as an organization at a college, university, or school of music that has been granted a charter by the fraternity. There are currently 251 active collegiate chapters spread across 38 provinces in the United States, and 450 chapters have been chartered in total over the history of the organization.
Alumni chapters existed between 1966 and 1976, after which they were designated as professional chapters by the 1976 National Assembly at the University of Evansville. Professional chapters, notable for being able to initiate brothers, lasted from the creation of an experimental chapter in Washington, D.C. in 1974 until the final two professional chapters dissolved in the 1985-1988 triennium. During the 1997 National Assembly in Cincinnati, Ohio, the fraternity returned to the idea of an organizational space for alumni engagement by establishing alumni associations. The fraternity currently has 24 alumni associations spread over nineteen provinces.




Formation and closure


Chapters are formed by the granting of charters to petitioning groups at qualified institutions of higher education. The only basic qualification for an institution to house a chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia is that it offers a four-year degree in music. Before receiving a charter, petitioning groups must seek recognition as a colony, which is the designation given to a developing chapter. After being recognized as a colony, the petitioning group must complete the fraternity's Colony Program, which consists of numerous activities designed to help the group organize itself as an effective and viable branch of the fraternity. After completing all aspects of the fraternity's Colony Program, a colony may be approved by the Commission on Standards to receive a chapter charter.
Chapter charters may be recalled by the Commission on Standards for operational or disciplinary reasons, either placing the chapter on inactive status or by expelling the chapter by revoking its charter respectively. Inactive chapters may be reactivated through the Colony Program, but groups at institutions that formerly housed chapters of Sinfonia that were expelled or had their charter revoked must wait no less than seven years before recolonizing.




Oldest chapters



The Alpha chapter, founded in 1898 at the New England Conservatory of Music as the Sinfonia Club, was active until 1977. It experienced a brief revival from 1991 to 1995, but closed once more and has remained inactive. The Delta chapter at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York was chartered on January 28, 1901, and remained continuously active for 123 years until being suspended in 2024.
Five chapters have passed the 100-year milestone: the Zeta chapter at the University of Missouri (chartered 1907), the Iota chapter at Northwestern University (chartered 1910), the Mu chapter at the University of Oklahoma (chartered 1912), the Alpha Theta chapter at Miami University (chartered 1923) and the Alpha Zeta chapter at Penn State University(chartered 1923). The Zeta Chapter is the oldest continually active chapter.




Naming conventions


Like those of many other Greek-letter fraternities, chapters of Phi Mu Alpha have names consisting of either one or two Greek letters. The names are issued in alphabetical order according to the dates on which the chapters are chartered. For instance, Alpha is the name given to the founding chapter, followed by Beta for the second chapter, then Gamma, and so on. Once the Greek alphabet had been exhausted by using single letters, two-letter names began to be issued, starting with Alpha Beta, then Alpha Gamma, then Alpha Delta, etc.
Names using the same two Greek letters, such as Alpha Alpha, Beta Beta, Gamma Gamma, etc., were not used. Also, in the first cycle of chapter naming, letters that came before the first letter of a chapter's name in the Greek alphabet were not used for the second letter. Thus, after Alpha Omega the next name issued was Beta Gamma, not Beta Alpha. Likewise, after Beta Omega, the next name issued was Gamma Delta; Gamma Alpha, and Gamma Beta were not used. Using this system, 300 names could be generated, but due to the fraternity's rapid expansion in the mid-20th century all of the possible names were exhausted in 1969. Beginning in that year (after the last name possible under the old system, Psi Omega, was issued), the fraternity began to issue unused two-letter names beginning with Beta Alpha. However, names with two identical Greek letters were still not used. Without using such repeated-letter names, there is a total of 576 possible one- and two-letter names, of which 444 have been issued to date. The only exception to the repeated-letter chapter name rule is Alpha Alpha. However, Alpha Alpha is not an actual collegiate chapter, but is instead the chapter designation used when initiating men as National Honorary members.
Colony names take one of two forms. If a chapter was previously chartered at an institution, then a colony that is later recognized at that institution is given the name of the chapter that was originally there. Upon the colony's successful completion of the colony program, the original chapter is reactivated and the original charter document (if it still exists) is reissued along with a separate Certificate of Reactivation. If there has never been a chapter at an institution, then a colony there is issued a name consisting of the state where the institution is located followed by a single Greek letter to distinguish it from any other colonies in the state (e.g., Texas Gamma, Ohio Beta, etc.). Upon the colony's successful completion of the colony program, a new chapter is installed and a charter with the next chapter name in sequence is issued.




= Naming anomalies

=
The fraternity has not always held to a strictly alphabetical naming scheme. Gamma and Zeta were reissued in the early days of the fraternity, while Mu Epsilon and Mu Kappa were never issued and will likely never be based on how far they are out of sequence. The founding order of some chapters does not strictly align to their names due to a period of rapid expansion in the 1950s and 1960s, where up to ten chapters were chartered in a single week.
Naming anomalies also have occurred at the chapter level. Following a merger of the Cincinnati College of Music and the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, their respective chapters Eta and Omicron combined to form Eta-Omicron; to date this is the only chapter that uses a hyphen in its name. Three institutions (Grambling State University, McNeese State University, and Texas Southern University) have each had two chapters with different names; the first chapter chartered at the institution was expelled and the later petitioning group requested that a new chapter be installed instead of the expelled chapter being reactivated.




Chapters


Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia has chartered 453 collegiate chapters in its history, of which 250 are currently active. The following table contains a comprehensive listing of all 453 collegiate chapters in the order that they were chartered. Active chapters are indicated in bold. Inactive chapters and institutions are in italics.




Notes






References






= Bibliography

=
Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia. "National Constitution and Bylaws." 2012 revision. Accessed 5 September 2015.
Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia. "Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia Fraternity Colony Program Overview." Accessed 5 September 2015.
Underwood, T. Jervis. Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia: A Centennial History, 2nd ed. Edited by David R. Irving. Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, 2005.

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