Music

Starting with your own interests as a musician, the course develops your core skills and gives you ways to apply them in practical employment contexts including education, community music, health and wellbeing, and arts management. The course focuses on developing your artistic practice as well as helping you learn new skills in areas such as:

• Performance, improvisation and ensemble musicianship
• Composition, arrangement and music for media
• Recording, documenting and music production
• Blogging, podcasting and online media
• Music teaching, workshop leading and social engagement
• Event management, marketing and creative entrepreneurship

Develop key professional skills and an impressive CV of evidence and experience that appeals to employers, preparing you for the music industry as it exists today.

Year one
Your first year focuses on developing and refining your core practical musicianship skills as a performer and/or composer. Through this practical work, you’ll learn about current music in relation to societal contexts, showing you the areas in which your practice can make a difference in people’s lives . Across the year, you’ll undertake a series of short projects that give you a chance to explore new aspects of music making and ways to share it with others, working in groups as well as on your own ideas.

Year two
Building on what you have learnt in the first year, we help you professionalise your work in relation to specific and applied industry contexts. You’ll collaborate with others and participate in external projects with our industry partners. As part of this work, you’ll be mentored to expand what you can do as a musician at a higher technical level and explore ways to work with people from other disciplines. You’ll also present your creative work in public events, including our annual University arts festival, Sparkfest.

Year three
In your final year, you’ll be supported in transitioning to work as an independent industry professional. You’ll design and deliver creative projects and events in areas including education, community music, health and wellbeing, and arts management. You’ll be able to focus on your individual career aspirations as a professional musician, and build the CV you need to get you there, supported by placement opportunities. We help you plan and manage projects, balancing creative and entrepreneurial decision-making, which lead to a large-scale final professional project in an area of your choice.

The core of the work you do is based around projects, working individually and collaboratively with others. You’ll work with our team of industry professionals, both within music and from other disciplines.

Teaching is practical and managed through a mix of workshops and rehearsals, seminars and lectures, alongside tutorial support. We provide regular sessions with visiting professionals which provide key industry insight.

All of our assessments are based in practical and applied music-making. In addition to the creative work you make through performances and compositions, you’ll create outputs such as high quality audio-visual documentation, podcasts, websites, teaching materials, project proposals and public events.

As a result, taken together, your assessment projects will form a portfolio. This portfolio can be used to evidence your skills to employers, as part of a showreel, or CV.

This optional placement year provides you with the opportunity to identify, apply for and secure professional experience, normally comprising one to three placements over a minimum of nine months. Successful completion of this module will demonstrate your ability to secure and sustain graduate-level employment.

By completing the module, you'll be entitled to the addition of 'with Professional Placement Year' to your degree title.

Before your Professional Placement Year, you'll work to secure your placement, constructing a development plan with your module leader and your placement coordinator from our Careers and Employability team.

On your return to University for your final year, you'll submit your Placement Portfolio, detailing your development on your placement.

The course is taught at our Newton Park campus, based in the Michael Tippett Centre, which houses a purpose-built concert hall, performance spaces, practice rooms, and recording studios.

Music students also have access to the campus’s wider arts facilities, including numerous electronic music studios, university theatre, and industry-spec TV studio.

• A purpose-built concert hall with Steinway D grand piano
• Seventeen practice rooms, three with electronically-variable acoustic
• Five recording studios
• Two multi-computer Mac labs with industry standard software including Sibelius, Logic Audio Pro, Ableton Live, ProTools, and Max/MSP
• University Asset Store offering free access to industry-spec audio-visual equipment for use on and off-campus
• A large collection of acoustic and electric instruments, including five grand pianos, orchestral percussion instruments, early music instruments and a full Javanese gamelan
• A substantial music library of scores and recordings, and a wide range of online music resources.