Home Courses Music BA (Hons) Music with Jazz Studies
Jazz student performing

Study music with a focus on jazz in the £4.8 million Conservatoire building

UCAS LogoUCAS Logo
W320
3 years full time
Bishop Otter Campus (Chichester)

90%

positivity for teaching
on my course

National Student Survey 2024

Top 15

in the UK for assessment
and feedback

National Student Survey 2024

31st

in the UK for Music

Guardian University Guide 2025

90%

positivity for teaching
on my course

National Student Survey 2024

Top 15

in the UK for assessment
and feedback

National Student Survey 2024

31st

in the UK for Music

Guardian University Guide 2025

Overview

This BA (Hons) Music with Jazz Studies degree is taught in our modern music facilities including computerised recording and media studios, well-equipped practice rooms (with grand pianos supplied by Steinway & Sons) and an acoustically superb performance venue.

You will explore musical context with a specific focus on jazz and have the opportunity to tailor your studies with optional modules in your second and third year. You will be able to take part in an extensive programme of professional concerts and masterclasses on campus, free to students, and have the chance to experience similar events at major UK conservatoires, where many of our students go on to study as postgraduates.

On this course you will:

  • Study a range of musical styles, genres and approaches with a focus on jazz.
  • Study within the Conservatoire.
  • Be able to join any of a large number of choirs, orchestras and ensembles.
  • Join a close community of 400+ student performers.
  • Develop your skills in problem-solving, analysis, self-management and interpersonal skills.

Our mission

Jazz Studies within the Music subject area at the University of Chichester aims to provide students with high-quality tuition combined with an exciting and enjoyable educational journey that challenges the individual through practical and theoretical skills. All students within the department have opportunities to become part of the jazz community, whether they are jazz musicians or not, and the curriculum encourages students to develop an appreciation of jazz as music of diversity, inclusivity and creativity. These values underpin the ethos of the teaching and are embedded within the curriculum so our students, who will inherit this growing tradition, foster a lifelong learning attitude to any creative endeavour and can appreciate jazz as a collaborative community art form.

Becky Wolff

Jazz Performance student
The Jazz department at the University of Chichester is diverse, exciting and very rewarding. With opportunities to perform every week and collaborate with other musicians in and out of the University, you learn a lot in a very short amount of time. The teaching is of the highest quality and from the beginning to the end of your degree you will find yourself part of the jazz family.

Teaching and Assessment

How you will learn

You will study through lecturers, seminars, practical classes and workshops. You will learn from a core team of experienced and qualified tutors alongside a wide-ranging team of more than 60 specialist instrumental and vocal teachers.

You will be assessed through a range of assignments, including:

  • Essays
  • Examinations
  • Exhibitions
  • Performances
  • Practical work
  • Project work
  • Presentations
  • Seminar discussions.

Saara Sofia Paakko

Conservatoire student
The atmosphere at the University is lovely due to the small size of the institution, and I love being around like-minded people.

The Course

What you will study

You will study a range of core and optional modules on this course.

Modules

This module list is indicative and subject to change.

Select a year

Introduction to Jazz Theory

Jazz theory is an important part of the overall development and toolbox of the developing jazz musician. This module will explore harmony, melody and rhythmic aspects of jazz theory and will seek to demonstrate through group analysis, how these components can be applied to standard jazz repertoire.

Jazz Repertoire

This module will explore a different composer and selected compositions each week. You will analyse selected work both theoretically and contextually and examine different versions and arrangements of the piece.

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.

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.

Ensemble

You will produce a professional standard performance, demonstrating confidence within your chosen repertoire(s) and technical and expressive maturity. You will need an appropriate balance in programming and the ability to lean towards either a supporting or leadership role and develop your skills in hosting events and presenting the work to others.

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.

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.

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.

Reading Popular Music

You will explore key critical texts and concepts such as authenticity, anthropology, ethnography and textual analysis, applying these to a variety of models in contemporary popular music.

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 Baroque

You will explore a broad range of musical genres, ideas, styles and constructional devices from the birth of opera in 1600, through the rapid development of concerti grossi, the mass and the oraotorio, to the seminal theoretical and compositional writings of Jean-Phillippe Rameau.

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.

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 Musical 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.

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.

Personal Study

In this module you will select an area of music to research theoretically and practically over a period of time.

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 ’50s 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.

Facilities

Use industry standard equipment

Lecturers

Learn from experienced performers, musicians and tutors

You will be taught by a core team of experienced and highly qualified tutors alongside a wide-ranging team of more than 60 specialist instrumental and vocal teachers.

As well as supporting student development and the student experience, our staff are active, practicing professional musicians and researchers who regularly perform and record. We have around 140 professional tutors who visit campus regularly throughout the semester to deliver our practical and contextual modules. You will be supported by your one-to-one tutor and your module tutors, as well as your Academic Advisor.

Study Abroad

Explore the opportunity to study part of your course abroad

As a student at the University of Chichester, you can explore opportunities to study abroad during your studies as you enrich and broaden your educational experiences.

Students who have done this in the past have found it to be an amazing experience to broaden their horizons, a great opportunity to meet new people, undertake further travelling and to immerse themselves within a new culture.

You will be fully supported throughout the process to help find the right destination institution for you and your course. We can take you through everything that you will need to consider, from visas to financial support, to ensure that you get the best out of your time studying abroad.

Careers

Where you could go after your studies

This BA (Hons) Music (or BMus) with Jazz Studies degree will prepare you for a range of careers after you graduate. You will have the opportunity to develop a variety of transferable skills and specific subject knowledge to prepare you for life after university.

Past music graduates have secured various roles in jazz performance, including:

  • Gigs and functions
  • Cruise musicians
  • Performing their own music at jazz clubs, concerts and festivals
  • Teachers at all levels of education
  • Music arrangers
  • Setting up their own record label and online resources
  • Group instrumentalists.

Further Study

You could choose to continue your studies at postgraduate level.

Study options at the University of Chichester include:

  • MA Music Performance
  • MA Music Teaching
  • PGCE
  • PhD/MPhil.

University of Chichester alumni who have completed a full undergraduate degree at the University will receive a 15% discount on their postgraduate fees.

Course Costs

Course Fees 2025/26

UK fee
£9,535
International fee
£16,344

For further details about fees, please see our Tuition Fees page.

For further details about international scholarships, please see our Scholarships page.

To find out about any additional costs on this course, please see our Additional Costs page.

Scholarships may be available for selected instruments; please enquire with the Head of Music.

 

Additional Course Costs

Some optional field trips ask for a student contribution (usually 50%) which can range from £50 to £250.

Entry Requirements

Typical offers (individual offers may vary):

UCAS
96-112
tariff points from A levels or combination with AS / EPQ / BTEC/ Cambridge Technical.
BTEC
MMM
IB
26 points
IELTS
6.0
with no element lower than 5.5.

Auditions

You will need to demonstrate your ability in an instrument or voice performance, display musical awareness and showcase your skills during your performance audition. If you have a high level of performance skills you may be considered for a lower academic offer.

Contextual offers

We believe everyone deserves an equal opportunity to pursue higher education, regardless of their background.

When we receive your application we consider your personal circumstances and the factors surrounding your achievements to see if you are eligible for a contextual offer. This is an offer with a reduced entry tariff – typically the equivalent of 16 fewer UCAS points (two A-level grades).

Find out more about our contextual offers.

Interviews and Auditions

Auditions and interviews usually run from January until March/April.

We aim to offer you a genuine dialogue during your application process. This gives you a sense of worth and achievement from the audition process itself; a sense of ownership for you during the process and, ultimately, is an opportunity for us to get a clear understanding of who you are, what you need and how we can best prepare you for your degree.

We judge you on your skills, your potential and your personality, not your background.

Booking your audition

If you are invited to audition you will receive an email asking you to book your audition date on ChiView. If you are unsuccessful we will email you to let you know.

You can usually choose between multiple days on ChiView at one time. If none of the current dates suit you please contact admissions@chi.ac.uk.

Once you have booked your audition, you will be able to access the audition guidance document on ChiView – just log into the ChiView portal, click on ‘Events schedule’ and then ‘View details’ to access the document, which will tell you how to prepare for your audition, what to expect on the day, etc.

If your situation changes and you can no longer attend your audition date, you should cancel your booking in ChiView by visiting your ‘Event Schedule’ and clicking ‘Cancel Attendance’. You also need to inform the admissions team by emailing admissions@chi.ac.uk, so we can send you a new audition invitation.

Using ChiView 

Sometimes if you are viewing your ChiView portal on a phone you will not be able to see the page correctly. If this happens you should try again on another device.

You may need to clear your browser history.

If you are still unable to see the ‘View details’ button, please check that you have successfully booked your audition by clicking ‘respond to interview invitation’.

If all else fails please email admissions@chi.ac.uk with your query and applicant number.

Your audition day

Once you have booked your audition, please log into the ChiView portal, click on ‘Events schedule’ and then ‘View details’ to access the audition guidance document, which will tell you (amongst other things) what will happen at the audition itself, a basic itinerary of the whole day, parking information, etc.

In brief, there should be an introductory talk by the department, the chance to meet lecturers and other applicants, as well as your opportunity to perform for the audition panel.

After your audition

After your audition, the panel will discuss your performance and pass our decision onto the admissions team, who will update UCAS and email you with the outcome, whatever it might be.

  • We make bespoke offers: Your offer is specifically for you. If we offer less than your predicted grades, this will reflect the potential and quality of your audition and we’d like to take a bit of pressure off of you heading into your exams.
  • We don’t do unconditional offers: Unless you already have your grades (you are a mature student), we will always insist on certain grade achievements because we want you to succeed in all aspects of your academic life including your A levels, BTEC, etc.
  • If you do not get the grades you wanted: Don’t panic. You received an offer because you were good enough for the department at audition. On Results Day, just ring us on the clearing hotline, so we can discuss things with you.
  • We may offer you a different course: We may offer you a place on an alternative, relevant course within the department, rather than offer you the course you applied for. If this is the case, we will state this in your offer letter/email and update your course on UCAS. We will explain our reasoning, which will revolve around placing you on the most appropriate course where we think you will thrive.

Charlie

BMus (Hons) Music Performance
I remember sitting in a Music A level lesson when I received my email offering me an audition to study BMus (Hons) Music Performance at the University of Chichester. I was immediately terrified of having to choose a piece to perform and to then perform it in front of tutors and other applicants. In the end I needn’t have worried at all, the audition experience was extremely enjoyable and relaxed. I had the best time meeting other prospective students, some of whom became course mates and one even a future housemate! Meeting the Head of Music, Ben Hall, was invaluable as it meant that any questions that I had about the course could be answered. He even gave us a tour of the Chichester campus and the music block which helped put us all at ease before we performed to each other.

FAQs

Frequently asked questions

How do I apply?

Click the ‘Apply now’ button to go to relevant UCAS page.

What are UCAS tariff points?

Many qualifications have a UCAS Tariff value. The score depends on the qualification, and the grade you achieved.

How do I know what my UCAS tariff points are?

Head to the UCAS Tariff Points web page where you can find a tariff points calculator that can tell you how much your qualification and grades are worth.

Our address

For visits

I’m looking for