Composition

We want you to graduate as a skilled composer with a deep understanding of contemporary music.

We’ll support developments in your creative practice through practical consideration of both your professional and academic skills, to help you:

• Improve the way you promote your work and plan projects
• Understand Composition as an academic discipline.

You’ll develop creative and technical skills throughout the course, alongside the ability to think critically about composition.

You’ll have opportunities to collaborate with other creative artists, such as choreographers, filmmakers and theatre practitioners, through joint projects and seminar discussion.

The MA and MRes Composition pathways offer a different emphasis. MRes Composition provides an opportunity to conduct an extended, focused composition project, combining both creative work and academic research. MA Composition provides a space to explore a wider range of approaches and to experiment with new ideas. Composers on both pathways are taught together and work with Bath Spa’s wider Music and Performance community.

Tutorials
We’ll meet with you on a one-to-one basis through weekly tutorials to help you develop your work technically and aesthetically.

Seminars
We’ll discuss broader issues in groups through weekly seminar sessions. Topics could include particular composers or approaches, compositional problems, or explorations of professional contexts.

Workshops
We organise rehearsals and workshops with visiting professional musicians and fellow students. This enables you to hear your work played live and to make changes based on discussion and feedback.

Students of MA Composition and MRes Composition participate in the same seminars and workshops.

This course includes or offers the following modules. Please check the programme document (below the main image on this page) for more details on which modules are core, required or optional.

MA Composition

• Research Methodologies and Context
• Portfolio One
• Professional Practice
• Intercultural Musicology
• Portfolio Two
• Performance Two
• Sound Production and Creative Project
• Intertextuality in Sound Production
• Sonic Architecture
• Visual Music
• Sound Design Practice
• Post Production
• Major Project

MRes Composition

• Research Methodologies and Context
• Professional Practice
• Research Project

The majority of assessment is based on your creative work, including compositions for specified visiting musicians and projects where you decide what to write. You’ll also produce work that assesses your professional and academic skills, including making a website, preparing a funding application, and researching an area of practice that links to your work.

If you take take the MA Composition pathway, you'll typically produce a varied portfolio, inspired in part by the opportunities and experiences afforded by the course, as well as your individual interests and future plans.

MRes composers will typically produce a portfolio of work articulated as a single project that is supported by a clear research context.

Each module has a weekly seminar which is either specific to the MA/MRes Composition or, for core skills, shared by all Composition students. You’ll also have a weekly tutorial during teaching weeks.

Throughout the year, we bring in visitors to talk about their work through the Creative Sound Forum, plus industry professionals, to deepen your knowledge and understanding of current contexts. We also bring in professional musicians to play one of your compositions.

We have good links with the UK contemporary music scene, and have regular visits from performers, composers and other industry speakers during the year. Recent visiting performers who have played student work include Plus Minus Ensemble, Kreutzer Quartet, Ensemble Bash, Christopher Redgate, Alexandra Wood, New London Chamber Ensemble and Darragh Morgan.

Composers and sound artists who have visited us to talk about their work include Peter Ablinger, Joanna Bailie, Laura Bowler, Gavin Bryars, Kim Cascone, Cathy von Eck, Jem Finer, Graham Fitkin, Bryn Harrison, Kathy Hinde, Tom Johnson, Liza Lim, Anton Lukoszevieze, Thomas Meadowcroft, Cassandra Miller, Claudia Molitor, Phill Niblock, Tim Parkinson, Michael Pisaro, Matthew Shlomowitz, Howard Skempton, Atau Tanaka, Jennifer Walshe, Michael Winter, Amnon Wolman.

We also run a regular series of presentations by visiting composers that brings together MA and PhD students with staff and colleagues from other disciplines. Industry and academic speakers also present their work at the commercially-orientated Music Think Tank (recent speakers include Paul Brindley, CEO at Music Ally; Paul Gray, Musicians' Union; Vick Bain, BASCA; Chris Carey from EMI; Will Page, chief economist PRS for Music; John Minch, CEO of Boosey and Hawkes/Imagem).

You’ll develop a broad range of intellectual, practical and transferable skills. We’ll help you prepare for a portfolio career built around your creative practice, drawing in other related areas of work such as:

• Teaching
• Editing
• Performing
• Work in other areas of the creative industries.

Our aim is that when you graduate from the Composition degree, you'll have developed core problem-solving, analytical, and critical skills to support you in the ever-evolving music and composition landscape.

Based at Newton Park’s Michael Tippett Centre, you’ll have access to a range of University services, venues and facilities (plus further specialist music resources) including:

• University Theatre
• Commons
• Newton Park Library
• Writing and Learning Centre
• English Language Unit
• Virtual Learning Environment.

As an MRes / MA Composition student, you'll have access to networked music technology labs with highly specified workstations, running core software including Pro Tools, Logic, MAX/MSP, Macromedia suites, and Final Cut.

We also have five purpose-built digital recording studios, featuring:

• A variety of portable sound-recording equipment and digital cameras
• A purpose-built concert hall with excellent acoustics and PA
• 17 practice rooms, three with electronically variable acoustic
• Large, well-stocked library of books, periodicals and CDs
• A wide range of medieval, Renaissance and Baroque instruments, and a large collection of percussion and orchestral instruments
• A Javanese Gamelan.