BA (Hons) Music

Masterclass

This module develops your basic performance and communication skills and your sense of performance context. You will develop your repertoire, your understanding of style and your skill in preparing for audition or performance.

Music Now

This module introduces you to the various critical and analytical approaches used when encountering new music, as you explore the skills needed during your degree and to research case studies of contemporary work.

Musical Grammar 1

This module will introduce, reintroduce and familiarise you with a range of aspects of musical structure and its notation. Alongside this, you will present and discuss your work, both individually and in groups – enhancing skills in teamwork and presentation, and building confidence.

Musical Grammar 2

This module builds on the knowledge you have accrued on music grammar and deepens your understanding of key elements of musical structure. You will continue to present and discuss your work, both individually and in groups – enhancing skills in teamwork and presentation, and building confidence.

Orchestral Experience

Recent performance practice has seen an increased interest in the historically-informed representation of music of the 18th and 19th centuries. This module is concerned with the musical styles of the 18th and 19th centuries as explored through the performance of orchestral or other set works.

Through a combination of practical and analytical study, you will identify the major forms, writing styles, and characteristics of orchestral works or other set works in performance.

Performance Development

This includes your 1 to 1 tuition in your selected instrumental or vocal study.

Professional Resilience

This module will explore a range of different strategies designed to offer support to the emerging arts practitioner and will introduce students to a number of different models of successful self-development.

Writing About Music

This module will introduce a range of concepts and debates which inform our lives as musicians.

You will develop your critical and analytical approach and gain the confidence and skill needed to express your analysis in written form.

These concepts and debates will be introduced and explored through the study and examination of a range of music and related artworks from different styles, genres, and historical periods.

Classicism

This module will consider the Classical style in music primarily through the work of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

Special consideration will be given to problems of formal analysis and the application of the conventions of a musicology to an artistic period so much defined by the work of a very small group of outstanding composers.

You will study a variety of work: solo, ensemble and orchestral, sacred and secular. You will undertake the preparation of a presentation or lecture recital relating to a movement from a late 18th century work, as chosen by the individual.

Events Management

This module explores the legal and logistical aspects of planning a range of different musical events and will experiment with presenting ideas to tutors and peers.

You will explore the relationships between stakeholders in event production, including artists, venues, audiences and funders, a range of models of event and festival production, and the diversity of approaches taken by different organisations and promoters.

As part of this, you will explore the input of artists and artist’s agents within event production and effective forms of operational and human resources management in the realization of festivals and events.

You will gain an understanding of the varying technical requirements related to promoting different types of musical events in distinct venues and locations, and a familiarity with licensing laws and health and safety considerations when related to festival and event production.

History of Modern Jazz

This module will look at jazz from two perspectives.

Initially, the module will look at the history of jazz, starting with its birth in New Orleans and examining its stylistic developments concentrating on a number of key figures and movements in its evolution up to present day. However by the 1960’s, the free jazz movement began to blur the boundaries and definitions of what jazz is.

Therefore, this module will also address the issue of the process that jazz has fore grounded as an evolving art form which constantly borrows from other musical influences to create ever-renewing hybrid forms of music. In looking at these two perspectives, the answer to the question ‘what is jazz?’ will be clarified alongside an appreciation for its rich and varied musical legacy.

Music and Society

This module will explore a range of topics, including:

• The canon
• Music and gender
• Music and mediation
• Music and education
• Music and cultural identity
• Popular and elite traditions.

You will be encouraged to discuss your own positioning and understanding within each of these subject areas, as well as drawing upon a variety of social and cultural theories including those held within musicology.

Music and the Community 1: Music and the Mind

This module considers how music defines and identify communities. Through an exploration of your own relationship with music, you will analyse the nature of musical experience and perception, with reference to selected musical texts.

You will identify and discuss functions of music that extend beyond entertainment. This will include examining the esoteric functions of music, shamanic practice, music and ritual, healing and therapeutic functions of music and concept of “”communitas””.

As part of this, you will examine the musical techniques that develop within such functions, including: overtone singing, collective improvisation, group drumming, chanting, vocal improvisation, intuitive harmonic voice work and interactive composition.

Opera and Operetta

Available in two different delivery modes, this module can be followed as either a conventional weekly series of lectures during semester two, or as a week long intensive culminating in a staged performance outside the semester period.

Learning is focused on examples drawn from 19th century opera forms, seeking to develop a lively sense of the evolving performance context which came to be described as operetta.

Orchestral Experience

Recent performance practice has seen an increased interest in the historically-informed representation of music of the 18th and 19th centuries. This module is concerned with the musical styles of the 18th and 19th centuries as explored through the performance of orchestral or other set works.

Through a combination of practical and analytical study, you will identify the major forms, writing styles, and characteristics of orchestral works or other set works in performance.

Performance Development

This includes your 1 to 1 tuition in your selected instrumental or vocal study.

Preparing Young Musicians for Assessment and Performance

The practical, placement experience allows you to become a beginner all over again by learning a ‘new’ instrument during this term, recreating the feelings experienced by beginners.

Reflections on this experience will inform and shape your approach to teaching in placement contexts.

You will also observe school children in the early stages of learning to sing and will reflect on how the observations relate to their personal experience during the module. Various repertoire, aural tests, scales, and sight reading will be included in a broad exploration of assessment and discussions will cover the pressures or constraints that exams place on students.

Professional Resilience

This module will explore a range of different strategies designed to offer support to the emerging arts practitioner and will introduce students to a number of different models of successful self-development.

Psychology of Learning and Teaching

This module explores the psychology, or the internal processes, of both the teacher and student perspective during musical learning. You will develop a general understanding of the historical framework of learning theories and social frameworks with psychology.

Self-Employment, Employment and Visualising Success

This module explores the local and national marketplace and will introduce you to a number of different models of successful positioning within it.

A successful career as a music professional needs to be informed, alongside musical and communication skills, by an understanding of the nature of self employment in business.

This module will seek to develop this, and to encourage a confident approach to the world beyond university, enabling a tailored financial and business planning which encourages an awareness of local markets and circumstances.

The Roots of Jazz

You will explore the roots of jazz and focus on the development of jazz between 1890 and 1930 as you critically analyse the social, political and cultural context in New Orleans.

Arranging for Jazz

You will develop your ability to take standard repertoire from the jazz canon and rearrange it into your own personal vision, which is a key skill within the jazz domain. You will develop a personal repertoire of arrangements and compositions to prepare you to secure gigs in the future.

Business Project

This module is taken by Arts Management students and aims to develop competency in business planning and imaginative use of physical and creative resources.

Club Music

Examine how music is used in clubs, the motivations of clubbers themselves, and the development of the role of the DJ.

You will consider the way technology has shaped the experience of club music, and how legal and marketing issues have shaped its consumption.

You are encouraged to explore the influence of club culture on mainstream commercial music, and the significance of symbols associated with a variety of club cultures and subcultures.

Devising for Music Theatre

This module examines some current examples of the genre, mostly in video format but with the possibility of visits to live performance as appropriate. the relationship between music and drama will be studied and analysed, in order to inform your own practical explorations. Tasks in group improvisation will be set throughout the first part of the module, performed and discussed in class and informed by related lectures and tutorials.

Group Teaching

You will engage in workshop activities to explore the potential of strategies and material that could be used in a range of teaching contexts.

You will reflect on relationships between this activity and your practical workshop experience and complete practical experience with a musical group/class/ensemble at the university, a school, or a performance centre where you will observe the methods, manner, and style of the teacher and then design a piece for that group.

Introduction to Fundraising in the Arts

The module will consider the third-sector in relation to the other two sectors, the legal structures for non-profit organisations and regional variations in regulation, alongside the charity model in at least one other country.

One to One Teaching

This module introduces a range of techniques in structuring lessons, communicating expressive and performance based concepts and problem solving designed to create an exciting and stimulating learning experience for individual singers, dancers and actors embarking on the early stages of study.

You will set your own goals in teaching and develop skills in analysing and measuring the outcomes of lessons, using this information to inform planning for effective teaching practices.

Opera

This module takes a chronological approach to the study of the genre, beginning with the early Baroque and offering examples of differing musical styles up until the first half of the 20th century, with a particular focus on the late 18th to mid 19th centuries.

The relationship between narrative and the musical expression of dramatic tension will be explored.

Your lectures will make connections between the function of musical structure and form within individual works and the development of character and plot.

Orchestral Experience

Recent performance practice has seen an increased interest in the historically-informed representation of music of the 18th and 19th centuries. This module is concerned with the musical styles of the 18th and 19th centuries as explored through the performance of orchestral or other set works.

Through a combination of practical and analytical study, you will identify the major forms, writing styles, and characteristics of orchestral works or other set works in performance.

Personal Study (Recital)

This module sees you select an area of study in performance, and develop it over an extended period.

For performers, this is an opportunity to present a longer and more challenging programme of work.

Personal Study (Written)

This module provides you with an opportunity to select an area of study of your choice, to research it and present your findings in written form, and to develop this over an extended period.

Post Modern Jazz

You will seek to find answers in a postmodern jazz world and ask if the intrinsic identity of jazz has been lost and where it can go from here. You will gain an understanding of its evolution since Coltrane by listening, playing, and analysing jazz from the 50’s to the present day.

Professional Resilience

This module will explore a range of different strategies designed to offer support to the emerging arts practitioner and will introduce students to a number of different models of successful self-development.

Romanticism

This module will develop your confident and probing analytical style with a close exploration of compositional intention, particularly where this is allied to programmatic or narrative elements in the models you study.

Structures and Politics of Rock Music

You will examine a broad range of contemporary musical texts to develop a broad definition of rock culture and use an in-depth study of a selection of significant artists and groups to provide insights into a range of stylistic and structural devices employed by rock musicians.

You will learn to demonstrate the political space inhabited by their music and complete creative tasks in song-writing and collaborative composition and improvisation.