MA Music (Audiovisual Cultures)

Today’s accelerated media landscape offers an unprecedented range of audiovisual experiences, from film and television to video games, interactive sports events, live-streamed political rallies, social media vlogs, augmented reality music videos and digital sonic art. Often, content is shared and extended across platforms, requiring new modes of sonic composition and engagement. As socialising, working, teaching and music-making have moved online during the current pandemic, these new modes have become increasingly significant. Musicians working with film, new media, cybermedia, video art, opera, music video, theatre and the sounding visual arts are challenging the traditional role of music within the moving-image arts and finding new ways to respond to our cultural and political environment. In this module, we explore the role of music and sound in this contemporary visual landscape.

Weekly seminars will engage with the music and sound in current fixed moving-image forms and the participatory worlds of new and augmented media. We will investigate our current political moment through a mixture of voices from academics, podcasters, activists, journalists, vloggers, filmmakers, marginalized scholars and so on. You will be invited to respond in similar ways, using prose, podcasts, video essays, vlogs, audiovisual curation, soundwalks, playlists, interviews and other forms of non-traditional assessment to construct your argument.

The module will offer creative opportunities for assessment that will provide you with the opportunity to engage with audiovisual theory in various practical ways and to hone skills like web building, curation, journalistic writing and strategies of practice-as-research.

The audiovisual cultures major project acts as a focus of the knowledge and skills acquired during the programme and gives students the opportunity to undertake genuinely original work, employing relevant research methods, writing skills and creative research practices that build on the advanced and systematic understandings developed in other elements of the programme. Most work on the major project will be independent study, supported by frequent and individual consultation with the appointed supervisor throughout the academic year, with particular emphasis on terms 2 and 3. The major project can be in two forms: a 12,000-word dissertation project and a portfolio of creative research with a 6000-word exegesis.

The module examines the uses of ethnographic film/video in music research. It will enable you to develop the practical, technical and theoretical skills necessary to make your own short ethnographic film on a music topic in a critical and self-reflexive manner.

Through a critical reading of key ethnographic films about music, the module will address questions of aesthetics, representation and ethics that arise in the process of filmmaking. It will also consider the use of digital media in musical ethnography more generally and assess the methods of analysis afforded by the visual documentation of music practices.

In complement with theoretical seminars, practical workshops on the methods of digital video recording and editing will familiarise you with a variety of approaches to ethnographic filmmaking and techniques of sound recording.

In this module, you'll investigate the convergence of sonic and visual media in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Focusing on the relationship between artists, composers and filmmakers, consider a wide range of moving image media, from film, television and music video, to the interactive forms of computer games and VJing.

You'll explore the ways in which music and the moving image interact with one another and how these interactions can influence our reception of, and engagement with, and audiovisual work. Of particular interest will be artists who work across genres and transgress disciplinary boundaries. Our explorations will be informed by the most recent critical work on audiovisual media, and we will use the notions of realism, narrative, screen space, immersion and transmedia to inform our thinking about each genre.  

This module will be delivered in conjunction with the Level 7 module of the same title; you'll therefore experience a discussion of these issues with the MA cohort as well as their level 6 peer group.

This module offers an overview of the formative debates in musicology over roughly the past three decades. Through a series of thematised readings each week, students will be introduced to a variety of issues that have permeated recent musical discourse, including gender, sexuality, race, canon, technology, performance, analysis and notation.

As well as investigating topics in art music, popular music and ethnomusicology, this module will consider other fields that have influenced musicological discourse, such as anthropology, philosophy and sociology. Throughout, students will be invited to debate the ways in which the history of music has been written: how certain music and musical cultures have entered into or been excluded from canons; how recent writing on music has attempted to redress such exclusions; and what the future of musicology might hold.

With this in mind, students will be encouraged to write essays that innovatively apply the concepts and issues explored during the module to a topic of their own devising. They will also complete two or three short reviews of a mixture of recent musicological articles and presentations given in the Music Research Series. Students should come away from this module not only with a firm understanding of the field, but also with the methods by which it has been (and is being) researched.

This module locates the emergence of the study of popular music within specific historical contexts and asks how scholarship has been informed by interdisciplinary dialogues. We’ll consider the (re)valuing of the ‘popular’ as a political project, and the institutionalisation of popular music studies within academia.

We’ll explore the various intellectual legacies that feed into the study of popular music, and how musicology engages with the practices of musicians and the arguments of critics. The module focuses on a selection of contemporary debates relating to different aspects of the production, mediation, circulation, and use of popular music. The module adopts a geographically and historically broad and inclusive approach to popular music, debates about music and social life, and encourages you to bring your own musical preferences to an engagement with issues and debates from different times and places.

The module explores contemporary approaches in ethnomusicology. The focus is on contemporary theoretical issues in the field, although current concerns will be situated within the history of ethnomusicological discourse. The module will address a range of topics and issues, such as fieldwork and ethnotheory, issues of gender, sexuality, race, decolonisation, globalisation, and diasporas, the “world music” phenomenon, medical and activist ethnomusicology, and ecomusicology.

During the module, you’ll gain familiarity with the connections between ethnomusicology and related disciplines such as anthropology, and with debates concerning disciplinary boundaries within music studies.

The aim of this module is to develop theoretical and critical frameworks for creative sound practice, and to engage with, apply, enact, and experiment with these ideas through practice: a process we could term 'praxis'.

We'll do this by way of lectures, discussions, and tutorials, referring to a variety of artistic practices that use sound in some way. The module explores core concepts, current thinking, and the salient historical and sociocultural contexts of these practices.

Key topics will include:

• the limits of sound
• aural diversity
• autonomous and heterogenous tendencies
• space and place
• the body
• sound technologies
• critical sound studies

The module introduces you to the principles of managing music creatively and critically, covering a variety of musical contexts and industries: popular music, jazz, western art music and the sonic arts, with contributions from industry specialist guest lecturers. The module focuses on the relationship between creative practice and creative management, of taking control of your work within rapidly changing arts, economic and social environment. You’ll explore finance and funding streams as well as gain practical experience of the necessary skills and considerations the module teaches by undertaking a real-world music management project.

Key topics will include:

• curation and entrepreneurialism in the music industry
• developing a project plan and researching your business model and method
• researching your musical field
• honing and pitching your idea or story, including publicity
• audiences and marketing
• event planning and production e.g. gigs, performances, launches
• finding the right venue or space
• maximising the potential of your idea through evaluation, problem solving, creative and lateral thinking

This module considers music both as the object of philosophy and as an artefact that may both engage with and communicate philosophical ideas. It does so through a joint focus on reading philosophical texts and the examination of musical ‘works’, practices, and approaches.

The module will address the intersections of these ideas through an examination of the methods of the philosophy of music—examining the ontology, epistemology, phenomenology, and aesthetics of music through these—and through key topics for the philosophy of music such as the body, the voice, materiality and instrumentality. In examining questions in these topics, you’ll draw on examples from your own musical background as well as those introduced in the module. Seminar discussions will be a key part of the work.

In addition, the module will consider world traditions of philosophy and their implications for the assessment of global music, and the intersection of aesthetics and society in the study and philosophy of musical works. Finally, the philosophy of music beyond the ‘musical’ will be considered, extending philosophical ideas about music into the experience of sound in everyday life.

Contemporary music may be viewed as a collection of situated and interconnected practices, in areas including creative, performative, critical and analytical work. This module gives a broad overview of practice and discourse in late 20^th and 21^st century music, and asks you to consider: how might a musical performance contribute to discourse? How might an analytical or critical methodology be practice?

While the module will primarily focus on music stemming from a Western Art Music tradition, contemporary improvised, popular, jazz and electronic musics will also be considered, in order to invite a holistic approach to the discourses and practices that define contemporary music.

You’ll explore and develop a position via your own combination of methodologies, which may include, embodied, analytical, collaborative, (auto-)ethnographic, historical, critically reflective, sociological, and discovery-led approaches, among others. You’ll then articulate your position either as a text-based (essay) or practice-based (performance) project, and in a conference-style video presentation.

In the 21^st century, musicians and music scholars no longer have to rely on published scores but can work directly from digitised originals or authoritative sources they’ve created. This module delivers the expertise to do both, and illuminates the processes, both historical and contemporary, through which music is transmitted.

You’ll be trained to work with all manner of sources, from manuscripts to digitised autographs to recordings. Skills are absorbed in lectures and lecture-workshops where we’ll explore different editorial methods, and the rationales and biases that undergird them. You’ll learn to command specialist terminology, to assess the quality of a score/transmission, and how to create a music edition.

Some lectures are held as private tours, hosted by a resident librarian, of London’s world-leading collections. These fieldtrips may be (subject to availability) to the Foundling Museum, Royal College of Music, and the British Library Music Collection. Focusing on Berta Joncus’s work for Bärenreiter, lectures culminate in looking at the latest innovations in critical editorship: the hybrid hard-copy score with online critical apparatus. For this module’s assessment, you’ll be able to focus on music that accords with your interests.

The aim of the module is to develop knowledge and understanding of musical performance as a research technique, particularly in relation to the music of other cultures. It will address practical, theoretical and conceptual issues concerning music performance, including issues such as the nature of musicality, processes of music learning, theories of improvisation, musical gesture and the body in music performance.

Theoretical understanding will be developed in conjunction with practical, experiential learning. You’ll develop a research-centered performance project by either learning to perform from a repertory outside your primary music culture or by developing expertise in a new area of performance practice.

This may include learning to perform a new instrument and/or genre; developing music improvisation skills; or the arrangement and performance of pieces from a particular music tradition. You’ll be required to give a short performance demonstrating the development of your performance skills and to theorise your performance practice and experiential learning in a written form.

Contemporary music ain't what it used to be. Though always multifaceted and to some extent mongrel, the musical avant-garde is now more mixed and sprawling than ever before. And yet efforts to grasp these current tendencies within the field, as well as historical contexts, often remain stuck in bubbles of either analytical specificity or generalised postmodern speculation.

This module sets out to act as a corrective to both of these tendencies by balancing grounding analytical depth with historical and cultural breadth. Accordingly, lectures apply various analytical methods to a broad range of contemporary music both to unlock the music’s workings and to explore its position as a bridge to culture more generally speaking. The module encourages students to think about the historical development and expansion of contemporary music while using analysis to prise open broader interpretative and theoretical issues.

We focus in the first instance on post-tonal musical languages such as serialism, extended tonality and atonality. We then move on to examine proliferating styles from across the contemporary spectrum, including spectral music, sound art, noise, extreme metal, new conceptualism and improvisation.

This module shows you how critical theory illuminates or impacts on a performer’s interpretation.  Performance is a decision-making process, guided often by attitudes towards the work, its meaning, and what is considered stylistically appropriate. Using case studies, you will explore three different models for interpretation – intention-validated, text-validated, and culture-validated – and analyse recordings to illustrate these models. By studying performances you will also explore how style is engendered. 

The module is divided into two sections. The first explains competing views about how we construe meaning in music. Questions central to this debate are: does the artist shape the work’s meaning for audiences; does the work’s meaning inhere to its formal structure; or do social conventions construct a musical language and its meaning? Students will also consider apposite issues – art versus craft, event-based performance, improvisation, mechanical reproduction – and the emergence of ‘style’ in performance and in repertory. Drawing together audio, visual and printed sources, the module’s second section studies legendary performers to ask how a performance articulates and relates to critical theory.

To take this module you should have: foundation skills in musical scholarship, in the history of Western Art Music, and in academic writing. All students (native and non-native speakers) should attend the 8-week module during Term 1 on academic writing: 'How to… a module for first year undergraduate and postgraduate students' held at the Centre for English Language and Academic Writing.

Coordinator: Berta Joncus

This module explores the development and deployment of critical discourses on popular music, focusing on the ways in which commentators – journalists, academics, bloggers, and consumers – have used words to represent sound, and to construct systems of meaning and value for the music they have loved and hated.

Spanning the 20^th century but focusing on present day practices, the module will address discourses on jazz, rock, dance, and pop in which commentators have attempted to articulate the excitement and anxiety these musics inspired as they came into being. Although much critical work has been done in print, the module will also consider how other media (radio, television, the internet) have shaped their own descriptive and evaluative practices.

Together, we’ll think about the relationship between critical listening and critical languages; between popular and academic discourses and modes of evaluation; and about the changing place and status of the popular music critic and scholar. Classes will comprise extended critical discussion leading out of weekly set readings and listening/writing exercises in which we will grapple with the problems and possibilities of representing and evaluating music in words.

To take this module, you should have familiarity with various styles of popular music and an ability to research and to write in a critical manner. Knowledge of music theory is neither assumed nor necessary.

This module provides a critical appraisal of the philosophical, conceptual and methodological limitations of existing approaches to researching popular music, whilst exploring ways of overcoming these and finding new research directions. The module surveys a cross section of studies that have been conducted in different contexts, with varied methodologies informed by contrasting agendas: This includes scholarship focussing separately on industries and production, texts and meaning, reception and consumption and scientific research on music. You think across disciplinary boundaries, informed by an oft-repeated maxim; that innovative and significant research entails the art of asking the right questions. Hence, you ask new questions of old research, and set up new questions for potential future research. The module will complement musicological techniques by drawing from methods deployed across the arts and humanities, business and the sciences when exploring methodological techniques for researching such questions.

The module combines investigation of theoretical perspectives towards musical performance (as) research with practical exploration through individual projects. It explores the diverse ways in which such practice can be informed by research and (the more challenging question) can constitute research in and of itself. A wide range of repertoires and approaches will be considered, ranging from historical performance practice issues and the challenges presented by contemporary notated scores to creative practice in the most diverse performance contexts, both physical and electronic. A central concern will be the extent to which the processes of performance should be documented, and ways in which technology can be harnessed to aid such documentation. The module will culminate in individually negotiated projects, in which elements of practice will be demonstrably related to the theoretical foundations established during the course.

The module will consist of (i) lecture/workshops with specialists across a variety of different fields (some of which may take place outside the regular timetable) and (ii) practical sessions drawing on students’ experience as performers and researchers. Each student will have the opportunity to present their project in progress at one workshop and to discuss both its practical and written elements in a one-to-one tutorial.

In addition, students will be encouraged to attend relevant research seminars, including interaction with practice-researchers from other departments in order to broaden their experience of different disciplines and approaches towards practice research. To take this module you should have experience as a performer (not necessarily at Masters level); an ability to write about performance issues in a critical and analytical manner; an ability to carry out independent research. Though the module is not restricted to any specific musical traditions, some knowledge of Western art-music repertoires and notations will be expected.

Why does music matter? What is its value? What makes music a distinctive form of communication? In what ways does music enhance people’s lives, and produce forms of individual and collective flourishing? Conversely, how can music reinforce social hierarchies? How does music link to questions of social power, notably in terms of class, ethnicity and gender, in relation to its production and consumption? How can music lead to individual and collective forms of flourishing?

This course explores how musical meanings are conveyed and understood and how this is mediated through the cultures and technologies of production and consumption. We will consider how music communicates mood and meaning, not only through associated imagery and the lyrical content of songs, but as sound itself. We will also think about the processes that link production, circulation and consumption, as well as explore the ways that music connects with individual and collective identities.

Underlying the option are a series of wider questions about how we might research, analyse and understand the complex of sounds, words and images that constitute contemporary popular and many other kinds of music. How and in what ways may we argue that music can express, influence and affect human actions and perceptions? How are beliefs, values and identities encoded and communicated as part of a collective experience or to individual listening subjects? How is what we listen to mediated by technologies and what affects does this has? How do we analyse and talk about musical sound when this often considered as having little to do with representation? Such questions have received relatively little attention in media, communication and cultural studies, and many of these issues remain under-researched. Hence, you are encouraged to draw on your own personal experience of music in everyday life and to make use of this material in connection with some of the theoretical approaches under discussion during seminars (as well as others you will have come across in your reading and on other courses).

This option is more theoretically demanding than it might initially appear, as it entails thinking critically about a number of everyday musical and sonic experiences that are often taken for granted. It also requires you to both bring a range of critical ideas to your analysis of music and musicians as well as musical examples (on CD, phone, mp3 file etc.) to play to your seminar group. You are encouraged to read widely for seminar discussion and when writing essays, and to make connections to a number of relevant and related theoretical debates outside of the immediate popular music literature.

Since the beginning of moving images, the world has moved from industrial and imperial to digital and global. Among the political movements that have been most important in the period since the invention of the movies are (neo)liberalism, Marxism, fascism, nationalism, feminism and anti-colonial struggles. These trends are inescapably bound up in the technologies, techniques and forms of the moving image and the sound arts, from the early days of cinema to contemporary handheld and immersive media.

This module investigates the politics of these forms and technologies as attempts at controlling the dispositions of minds and bodies and as struggles for their emancipation. It will address a broad range of topics from the power of sounds, images and visual apparatuses in the 20^th and 21^st centuries to the relationship of politics and aesthetics, the problem of democracy, and ideology critique.

This module examines a selection of films generally understood as examples of “world cinema”. It analyses the critical and conceptual approaches which have come to define the academic study of national and international film cultures, specifically ideas of “third” and “third world” cinema, and theories of regional and transnational cultures of production and reception.

Divided into three sections, the module will address a body of movies from Africa, Latin America and Asia that have been released over the last forty years according to three guiding themes: globalised economies, activism and populism. We will be investing these films’ formal strategies and thematic concerns; their social and cultural specificity or “universalism” (alongside the politics of that distinction); their industrial and institutional contexts; and their national and international status (for example, in their home countries and in the festival circuit). How different forms of colonisation are absorbed and interrogated will be a question that threads through the entire module.

The critique of capitalism has been an important horizon for research and theory in cultural studies since its inception. This course introduces and engages with the imbrication of capitalism and culture through a series of interlinked contexts, in the process exploring aspects of the history of cultural studies as a discipline (or anti-discipline), the cultural theory and philosophy of capitalism, and possible cultural studies responses to apparently dramatic, contemporary and ongoing shifts in the nature, operation and understanding of capitalism.

We will consider the evolution of cultural studies from its early focus on capitalism and class relations, to its integration of such critiques into a still-expanding range of areas of concern, e.g. in terms of gender, race, sexuality, postcolonialism and posthumanism. We will engage with key concepts and paradigms from cultural theory that have sought to understand the cultural dimension and functioning of capital, such as commodity fetishism, gift exchange, debt, neoliberalism, information capitalism, and post-natural ecology. We will ask how contemporary global phenomena such as the rise of digital networking, climate change and financial crisis transform the relationship between capitalism and culture.

In exploring these themes and phenomena, the module considers some of the ways modern critical approaches such as Marxism, feminism, decolonial thought/praxis and critical posthumanism have addressed capitalism, and pays particular attention to the roles of fiction and imagination in both the functioning and critique of capitalism.  

From Ferguson to Gaza, from the local to the global, this module proposes that we are faced with the necessity to revisit the canonical texts of postcolonial theory in order to make sense of our contemporary world. The aim of the module is to introduce you to a selection of these founding texts, and to consider the manner in which the spectre of colonialism persists in our present, both in our material reality and as a ‘spectropoetics’ that haunts the unconscious.

In this sense, you will read classic postcolonial texts of the twentieth century together with contemporary academic, activist and artistic interventions and countersignatures. Close, first-hand reading of texts is emphasised and you are required to probe the whole spectrum of postcolonial thinking—from literary theory, politics, psychoanalysis, diaspora studies, race and gender studies to philosophy, art, anthropology and history—and as such interrogate the production and circulation of knowledge from diverse positionalities. We seek to problematize the very notion of post-coloniality, understood not as a temporal marker but more as a style of thought—as a problem, a question and an option, an ‘epistemic and political project’.

We begin the module from the present, with a questioning of the links and divergences between postcolonial theory and current decolonial thinking (in particular where this concerns struggles across today’s global south), in order to invest our readings of canonical postcolonial texts with a sense of urgency and to set out a disciplinary framework.

Weekly topics are organised conceptually and across geographical and temporal boundaries through the themes such as the following, each of which re-inflects the next: objectivity; recognition; representation; ecology; relation; translation; ambivalence, appropriation; repair and reconciliation.

This module will examine how histories of Western imperialism have shaped the landscapes of the present. Our task is to explore how contemporary racial and national formations (ideas about ‘Britishness’, ‘whiteness’, and so on) exist in a complex and intimate relationship to longer histories of empire. In addition to introducing key concepts from critical race and postcolonial studies, lectures will also offer phenomenological interpretations of how race structures the present often by receding into the background, as well as drawing on theories of affect and emotion to explore how security regimes become racial regimes. Our concern is with how histories of empire ‘get under the skin,’ and set reading include works that reflect on the experience of being or becoming strangers, or ‘bodies out of place.’ We attend to the intersection between race, gender and sexuality throughout

Within the humanities, sciences, and outside the academy we are witnessing a ‘turn to the body’. That is, from contagions, which spread virally on social media seen to work through embodied forms of sense-making and perception, through to the amplification of the senses, attention and perception within simulated realities; the modulation of emotion, affect and feeling, and the creation of mediated intimacy across a range of media forms; through to a range of practices which target the body as the site of change, expression and transformation. The body and its capacity for mediation is central to understanding media and communications. This option will explore these debates by encouraging the student to think through their own embodied experience in relation to a number of case studies. These will include media representations and eating disorders; body image; queer and transgendered bodies; social media contagions, non-verbal and subliminal communication; affect and emotion; film and the senses (including suggestion); narrative and identity; images and the non-visual; biomediation; and mental health and the media (particularly exploring mental health and difference in the context of diasporic media).

The module draws from a wide range of debates and theories across the field of body studies, including affect studies, queer theory, feminisms, cultural studies, media studies and sociology. It will provide students with some timely and novel ways of thinking about the place of experience within contemporary governance and communication processes.

This module aims to explore why music matters sociologically speaking. It discusses the relationship between music - both orchestral and popular - and social life in a wide range of spheres including the economy of music, the relationship between musical taste and social divisions, the enlisting of songs politically through national anthems and state propaganda, music as self-expression and political resistance, the changing media forms and technologies of sound produciton and the therapeutic potential of music.

The module aims to explain the place of music in society. Although, what is proposed is more than merely the sociology of music ie. where sociological tools are used to unlock the codes and secrets of musical culture. Rather, the module aims to do sociology with music emphasising how developing a deeper attentiveness to music can also improve our capacities as researchers and critics.

This option module examines the relations between gender, sexuality and media. It aims to explore the ways in which gender and sexuality are constituted through a broad range of media, and how they may be resisted, intervened in and created differently. The module considers media in an open sense, understanding it to include practices of mediation, technological processes and modes of production and consumption, as well as particular cultural forms including television, film, music, digital and social media, art and design. It attends to how gender and sexuality are not stable identities or classifications but are instead processes involving relations with media and technologies, and with ‘race’, ethnicity, class and dis/ability.

The module is taught in a combination of lectures, seminars, screenings and workshops. As well as exploring media through different theoretical, conceptual and methodological approaches, practice-research is embedded in the module, meaning that you will try out different practices of making and analysing media. As examples, these practices might include experimenting with creative writing, blogging, collaging, photography, video, drawing. This work will go towards a portfolio that you will build up over the term.

Course convenor: Rebecca Coleman

A student-centred collaborative learning environment in involved with The Centre for Feminist Research and the Methods Lab will deliver an interactive method of learning and exchange led by specialists in the field to understand as well as enact feminist research methods. Drawing on a multi-disciplinary approach this module emphasises multi-methods. Taught by feminist researchers sessions consist of lectures, field visits, small group work and peer feedback sessions. Ethnography, new maps, walks, film, experiments, interviews, audio, documents, narrative, architectural encounters and exhibitions will all feature across the period of exchange. A series of case studies, from specialists in the field, will offer students the opportunity to explore the developments of feminist methods, within an inter-disciplinary critical and practice-based approach.