Graduate Diploma in Music

In this module, you'll be required to design and execute a research project on a musical topic of your choice, and to present your research as either an essay or a practice research portfolio of equivalent length, in a format prescribed within the module.

Research topics must be related in some way to modules you've taken earlier in your degree, and must be approved by the Department. Once approved, you'll be allocated a specialist member of staff to supervise your work.

You'll also be supported by a series of introductory and plenary sessions covering research skills, methodologies and ethics that will be relevant to them no matter their topic or research medium. In addition, two group sessions bring together a small number of students working on similar topics in order to discuss work in progress. Here, guided by their supervisor, you'll have the opportunity to discuss and share questions, problems, solutions and source materials.

You'll apply your existing practical and creative skills to questions of the development of tacit knowledge and epistemic practices in music, deploying composition, performance or technology-based skills to investigate their research questions. You'll be expected to develop both an individual perspective on your chosen topic and a convincing argument for your point of view, informed and supported by relevant primary materials, secondary literature, empirical approaches and/or their own practice. You may submit analytical or graphic examples, audio or video material (in any standard format), scores, or other material in support of your work. 

In this module, you'll build on the skills you learned through Performance: Techniques & Repertoire, and Performance: Styles & Contexts. You'll be challenged to develop your creative practice as a performer in a rigorous and personally invested way. You'll be encouraged to think more deeply about the decisions performers make when interpreting chosen musical texts – scores, charts, arrangements, editions, etc. 

Performances will be presented and assessed under broad repertoire categories of Jazz and CCE (Classical, Contemporary & Experimental) which are flexible and sometimes overlapping. It will be possible to focus on one genre or to move fluidly between different areas of practice. You may self-select different repertoire categories across three assessments. Where appropriate, you may also perform your own compositions. 

Collaboration is central in this module, with a substantial collaborative project mid-year. You'll then curate a Final Performance that may include solo and/or ensemble repertoire. In addition to the two assessed performances, you'll explore ways to articulate and present your working process in a Creative Practice Commentary presentation. Diversity and representation will be considered in your repertoire, with guidelines, discussion, and resources provided. 

You'll be supported in the development of advanced musicianship, proficiency and embodied knowledge in a community of practice. The lectures, seminars, masterclasses and coachings that make up the module will be supported by 1-to-1 specialist tuition on their first instrument/voice. 

Students are advised that progression to Advanced Performance (L3) should only be considered by those who have been achieving marks in the 2.1 range or higher in the Performance Styles & Context (L2) module. Progression for those who have not achieved such marks will be at the discretion of the Director of Performance.

This module will engage you in discussions of compositional approaches and matters of professionalisation that are relevant to composition.   
This module is split into four pathways to help you build on compositional techniques and skills that you developed at level 5. These pathways are:

• Contemporary Classical and Experimental Music (CCE)
• Jazz
• Songwriting
• Electronic Music.

In the second half of this module, you'll put your technical and creative skills into practice. Supported by staff in the Department of Music, you'll be encouraged to develop a portfolio of work with recourse to the department’s ensembles, studio facilities, extracurricular opportunities or using appropriate software depending on the genre and approach.

Acoustic ecology explores the inter-relationship between individuals and communities and all the sounds in the surrounding environment. It can be human-centered or potentially include all sound-emitting and sound-receiving entities in the environment.

In this practice module, you'll critically and artistically explore the main themes of acoustic ecology from different perspectives, with an emphasis on the role of field recording in creatively responding to, documenting and/or commenting on those issues through composition. You'll refer to related fields such as acoustics, bioacoustics, environmental studies and environmental health. A wide range of field recording techniques will be presented, and best fieldcraft will be discussed. Soundwalking will be presented as one of the key methods.

The place of voice in the soundscape and the use of interviewing and voiceovers will be discussed. With guidance from the tutor, students will devise an individual project related to the themes explored in class, making field recordings and working with them, resulting in a composition, together with a commentary that contextualises the work with reference to theoretical considerations and practice.

Why was a celebrity music industry first generated in 18th-century London? The answer, in part, is that Britain led the global trade in enslaved Africans. In this module you'll explore how profits and attitudes derived from the ‘Black Atlantic’ (Paul Gilroy’s term) fuelled commerce in entertainment that eventually embraced artists of African descent. You'll examine historic materials in class through lectures and creative practice workshops.   

Our core text is Polly, a ballad opera of 1728 set in Jamaica which skewered Britain’s profits from the slave trade so effectively that the government banned it. In Polly, author John Gay showed how a large flow of money into Britain worsened inequality – a distortion Gay highlighted by pillorying music’s consumption – put a premium on celebrity, and fuelled the politics of identities sexual, racial, and social.

Our lectures will start with a clear understanding of what present-day scholars mean by the ‘Black Atlantic’ and ’celebrity’, after which we'll delve into the issues Gay raised, and the music he linked to those issues. The commercialisation of popular music, the association of Italian opera with connoisseurship, immoral wealth, and trans*/deviant sexuality, and audience fascination with ‘exotic’ virtuosi like the Haitian-born violinist-composer Joseph Bologne, Chevallier de Saint-Georges, will be topics of lectures and workshops. 

We'll celebrate 18th-century artists’ innovations and unique creative practices, especially in improvisation, which we will explore in workshops. Lectures in the second half of the module will each focus on two contrasting musicians (black/white, straight/queer, child/adult), whom you'll examine within their historical context but also relate to current-day artists. The module may include a field trip to this module’s partner institution the Foundling Museum; if the field trip is not possible, a virtual tour will be provided.  

This same module will be delivered at Levels 5 and 6; you'll have the opportunity to discuss and perform with the third-year cohort as well as your level 5 peer group. ' 

This module will enable you to develop skills in music performance through practical workshops on a gamelan ensemble from the Sunda region of Indonesia called gamelan degung.

As well as learning traditional gamelan styles and frameworks for variation and improvisation, you'll be encouraged to develop your own musical creativity through devising innovative approaches to ensemble performance, interaction and improvisation. You'll take part in practical workshops through lectures and seminars, which will examine theoretical issues concerning music learning, performance practice and improvisation in various types of Southeast Asian music. These will focus on issues of musical competence and improvisation in order to provide a theoretical and contextual framework for critical reflection on the oral methods of music learning and performance skills developed during the module.

In this module, you'll investigate theoretical, practical and social aspects of music practices that push against or move away from a perceived mainstream. You'll study aesthetic and conceptual extremes and experiments; sounds and ideas that complicate notions of genre and may even call into question the boundaries of music as a form; and musical and extra-musical worlds that invite new categorisations.  

Through the lectures, you'll explore the possibilities of musical practices that question established economic, political and artistic/aesthetic structures as factors affecting creative decision-making. These practices may be interrogated as conceptually, artistically or politically driven, or can be discussed as being idiomatically contemporary, socially connected and/or relevant. You'll interrogate terms like 'underground', 'avant-garde', 'alternative', 'DIY', 'independent', which define discourse around these musics. You'll also respond to the themes of the module through creative practice. 

How have people made sense of, and articulated in music, the change and disruption that characterises modern life everywhere? In order to answer that question, you'll concepts of modernism, Afromodernism, postmodernism and post-postmodernism in music of all kinds, and in culture more broadly, as they have been developed and employed across the 20th and 21st centuries.

You'll be encouraged to explore the creative and theoretical uses that, in attempting to express the hope and confusion of the tumultuous present, musical modernisms have made of the future and the past, the human and the machine, the present and the virtual.

A series of lectures explores modernisms as they shaped and reflected theory and practice in art, popular and experimental musics since 1900. You'll be supported to think critically and creatively about the claims inherent to those modernisms’ thought and action. In preparing written assignments, you'll beable to focus on historical topics, or discuss the themes studied in contemporary contexts. 

This module will be delivered at both Levels 5 and 6, offering the chance for collaboration with students across year groups. 

In this module, you'll explore the impact of Soviet politics on music c.1917-75. You'll investigate the often erratic, invariably vague and ever-shifting nature of state interference, from the loose controls of the 1920s to the introduction of Socialist Realism in the 30s, from the demands for patriotic music in the war years to the reassessment of Stalinism during the Thaw. 

The composers at the centre of this module will be Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Mosolov, Gubaidulina and Schnittke. Focusing on symphonies, operas, ballets, film scores, mass songs and cantatas, you'll examine the ways in which these and other composers negotiated the pursuit of their artistic ideals with pressures to create music suitable for the proletariat. In so doing, you'll consider how it was that the Soviet regime produced some of the most powerful, and some of the most banal, music of the twentieth century. 

You'll be encouraged to engage in broader musicological and historiographical debates about the position of Soviet propaganda music today, and the problems of lingering Cold War biases and mythologies in writings on Soviet music. 

This module will be delivered at both Levels 5 and 6, offering the chance for collaboration with students across year groups.

In this module, you'll study the standard principles of orchestration and arrangement as found in various forms of late twentieth and early twenty-first-century music. This includes concert composition and orchestral transcription, film scoring, and jazz/popular music studio arranging – drawing from a diversity of source material.

You'll explore the idiomatic use of orchestral instruments and instrumental groups, standard orchestration and orchestral transcription techniques, and offer creative resources for arrangement.

You'll develop the conceptual and analytical tools to ‘reverse engineer’ techniques of orchestration and arrangement in scores and recordings. You'll learn through lectures, online podcasts and slideshows, seminars, and group and individual tutorials.

This production-centred module will provide you with an introduction to audiovisual composition. You'll explore several theoretical and practical approaches as well as video production software and techniques. You'll learn about the history of visual music and other cultural and historical contexts for audiovisual composition. You'll analyse and discuss pieces of historical significance along with modern examples.

By the end of the module, you'll produce two audiovisual works using the theory and examples discussed in class to inform their compositional strategies. Production techniques taught in the module will centre on video editing and processing, including other aspects of production such as filming and compression for various distribution formats.

In this module, you'll explore creativity in performance. By engaging with some of the key ideas on improvisation, which range from the highly technical to the purely spiritual, you'll be introduced to the concepts of spontaneous creativity.

Through a series of lectures and workshops, you'll study in many forms from completely free improvisation to creativity housed within more restricted musical parameters.

You can choose to focus on one style of improvisation on which to be assessed.

This research-led module gives you the opportunity to work on a specialised area of popular music studies with a specialist in that field. Subject area grounding will be provided throughout, but you will also be asked to engage with the latest research and thinking, and to produce written work that attempts to function at the (sub)discipline’s cutting edge. Module topics may be contemporary or historical, and may centre on musical and/or broader cultural practices. While you will require extensive knowledge of popular music repertoires and discourses developed over the programme’s first two levels, you may also be asked to draw upon work and methodologies from a number of humanities and social sciences disciplines.

You'll explore the ways in which popular music’s proliferation across the globe is both tied to technological advances, yet intricately bound up in specific musical and social histories. You'll learn how practice can be mapped onto migratory patterns, understood in relation to the cultural hegemony of the United States and read through the legacy of colonialism and enduring colonial structures. You'll question how the emergence of new media (such as YouTube, online radio, social media) has affected the international propagation of performance practice, how global capital interacts with subaltern innovations, and appraise whether locality can remain relevant in an increasingly digital age. 

You'll learn to trace transnational performance networks, assess the democratising potential of the internet and engage in complex debates around race, place and belonging. This is achieved through focusing on case studies across a variety of new styles and international interpretations of existing forms. We will ask how drill makes sense in the suburbs of Western Sydney, question why Tanzania has become a beacon for East African rap, and unpack how geographically disparate genres—such as footwork, shangaan electro and gqom—are united through online-offline communities of dancers, MCs and DJs. 

In this module, you'll explore the creative use of real-time software for improvisation and composition. The principal environment employed will be Max/MSP/Jitter, although other environments are supported and you'll be encouraged to use them in addition to or in place of Max. You'll learn some fundamentals of Max/MSP programming, including real-time audio signal processing and audio analysis.

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.

In this module, you'll explore jazz performance through the lens of contemporary UK practice from the 1980s to the present day. You'll need some experience performing in small Jazz ensembles where improvisation is deployed in shaping the musical material (for example in the department’s Creative Jazz Workshop ensemble).  

Delivered jointly at level 5 and 6 as mixed activity, you'll approach the work of key creative jazz practitioners through analysis and evaluation, supported by your independent research. You'll apply knowledge from these activities practically (to given or related source material) in ensemble performance workshops. Here students at L5 and L6 will combine to form jazz performance ensembles which will vary over the course of the module

As well as considering stylistic musical parameters (groove, harmony, meter, melody, vocabulary, instrumentation etc.) you'll consider issues that have shaped and are currently shaping the UK jazz horizon such as heritage, race and gender. You'll investigate how these issues establish and consolidate the notion of “scene”, allowing you to locate your personal practice in relation to this.

Co-requisite: Techniques in Jazz