BMus (Hons) Popular Music

This module will provide a foundation for understanding the key creative elements common in many forms of popular music. Term one will focus on roots of popular style in Anglo-Celtic folk music stressing the importance of orality, song form, interaction/improvisation, modality, standard progressions, rhythm and the role of social processes in shaping music. Term two and three will focus on the creative concepts at the heart of 20th century popular music in the Western world: riffs, repetition in the Blues, fragmentation, recycling/sampling, lyrics and use of new technologies.

This module supports you in developing practical skills in popular musicianship through weekly classes and individual vocal/instrumental lessons. Instruction is provided in all areas of practical musicianship including aural skills, ensemble work, improvisation and performance.

There are opportunities to develop knowledge of performance, performance technologies and skills relating to rehearsal, practice and presentation and organizing ensembles for recording.

In this module, you'll examine aesthetic worlds, socio-cultural framings and issues of identity within artistic practice in contemporary popular music. You'll explore themes such as issues around artistic intention, reception and production, communication theory, the embodied and the virtual, foundational aesthetics and community practice.

You'll develop an understanding of the artistic role in society through a consideration of the intentions, roles and practices in your own work and those of artists in the field. The pantheon of transdisciplinary artistic practice in popular music will be considered as a space of change, complexity, tension and responsibility. The function of popular music will be explored in relation to the broader field of creative arts.

This module will introduce you to critical questions in contemporary musicology and the study of contemporary musics. You'll be equipped with the critical, theoretical, and practical tools with which to advance your study of music throughout the degree programme.

You'll explore examples drawn from Western popular and classical musics from the 20th and 21st centuries, and electronic music and sound art. You'll examine how global traditions of musics may trouble the kinds of questions that musicologists may ask of contemporary musics and consider the alternative music ‘histories’ of the 20th and 21st Centuries that could be explored. Rather than take a historical overview of its themes and topics, the module is structured around key questions in order to:

• Consider the ways that recent and contemporary music has been thought and written about.
• Explore historical cultural contexts.
• Develop your skills in critical reasoning, conducting research and presenting spoken and written arguments.

You'll be encouraged to think about relationships between musics, as well as between musicians, their works and their contexts. You'll engage with appropriate ideas from such disciplines as historical studies, sociology, cultural studies, ethnomusicology and musical analysis. 

Your learning in this module will be supported by regular meetings with your personal tutor group. Through this group, you'll reflect on your learning journey in the module and relate your experiences in your programme as a whole. These sessions will allow you to make and explore connections between this module and your personal musical experiences, and to relate the study skills gained through their learning to their programme more broadly, and future plans.

This module begins by extending your knowledge of popular music history across the 20th century, giving you a better understanding of what happened, when, and why. Through set listening and discussion, you'll think about how to recognise, analyse and verbalise the workings of different historical styles and techniques of creation and production. In lectures and through set readings,  you'll explore concepts – like tradition, agency, or emergence – that will enable them to think critically about key problems in popular music history. These problems are primarily concerned with musical creativity. You'll learn how to account for historical appearance of new genres and reflect on how musicians influence future generations. They will also question the freedom of individuals to create and innovate, asking instead how this innovation has been constrained or steered by context. A full appraisal of all these issues will mean thinking not just about the ways music has been made, but also how it has been disseminated, listened to and talked about. In the second term this module considers a number of key issues in the cultural study of popular music, concentrating on three contexts in particular: society and politics; analytical approaches; and significant themes in popular culture such as appropriation and articulations of race, gender and sexuality. 

Throughout both terms, you'll be encouraged to reflect on the processes of popular history writing, and on diverging views from different schools of thought within popular music studies. Classes make use of scholarly literature but also consider the different (and often competing) ways that music, and the issues that surround it have been interpreted by journalists and audiences.

This module continues the work begun in ensemble studies, and the study of song form and practice, encouraging further development of skills to support individuated and collaborative creative practice. This will include the exploration of compositional intention, collaboration, artistry, and developing strategies for making in live musical performances.

You'll be encouraged to challenge yourself as a performer, composer and artistic producer in contemporary music industry contexts. An understanding of industry, artistry and broader community will be explored in several ways including through analyses of influence, genre and creative stylistic approaches. The application of both concrete and cognitive strategies to key issues in personal, aesthetic, creative and artistic practice will be explored conceptually and practically through performance for video, live performance and presentation.

In this module, you'll explore the principals and foundations of songwriting as composition including song conventions and their interventions, structure, form, meaning, lyric writing, intention, strategies for making, performativity, voice, sound and identity.

Through building an understanding of the interdisciplinarity of songwriting work, you'll develop the ability to orient your own practice in music industry contexts. Issues such as the influence of commerce, authorship, and interpretation are considered in the context of song’s histories and contemporaneity. Yoursongwriting practices are centered in workshops to develop a variety of creative, producing, and reflective skills. You'll  work towards the recording of three original songs, two with an accompanying reflective piece of writing.

The nineteenth century has long been deemed a romantic age, in which music and its listeners became concerned primarily with the transcendental and the otherworldly. But, this was a time in which material things were profoundly altering the ways people wrote, performed and encountered music. In the wake of the industrial revolution, composers from Schubert in his ‘Der Leiermann’ to Smetana in his Mà vlast, found themselves compelled to capture the sounds of modernity or the sounds of landscapes under threat of destruction.

The musicking body, meanwhile, became a site of fascination and heated debate. Critics by turn reeled from and extolled overwhelming noise levels in the opera house, the superhuman feats of such performers as Clara Schumann, and the increasing prominence of non-normative and transgressive bodies on the stage. Amidst all this, the very act of listening was being forever changed by new technologies of illumination, staging, recording and travel.  

Through consulting a variety of primary sources, from scores, letters and reviews to images and early sound recordings, you'll be encouraged to carry out your own research into music-making in the 19th century. You'll come closer to an understanding of how music was experienced in the past. By turning to the material, the bodily and the real, this module not only aims to unravel conventional definitions of romanticism, but to challenge the objects and techniques of musicological study borne out of this movement that linger today. 

In this module, you'll address the aesthetic questions that are of relevance to all musicians: questions of musical beauty, value, meaning, and its experience. You'll consider the history of aesthetics, whilst clarifying these issues by discussing them systematically, carefully analysing the concepts involved and by uncovering the cultural conditions implicated in the construction of individual and cultural values.

Discussion of examples of musics and their properties will inform the approach taken in the lectures, but so too will the complex relationships between music, musicians, society and culture. As a result, you'll explore individual and social conceptions of cultural value and aesthetic experience alongside questions of musical beauty and experience. This will involve the consideration of the culture of art and music, and their institutions, alongside the consideration of music as a discipline of art. In thinking about these types of question, you'll discuss the ideas of philosophers, theorists, musicologists and musicians, in the context of relevant musical case studies. The main aim of the module is not to settle on the ‘right’ answers (they may not exist), but to help you to think in logical and consistent ways about the principles by which they might begin to negotiate and evaluate your experiences in relation to music and to the world.

Music has long been linked to individual and collective senses of identity. For example, musicologists and journalists have drawn connections between music-making/listening and the formation of identities. In addition, arts policymakers and arts organisations have considered identity and how that relates to music participation and appreciation. By listening to or making certain types of music, we can communicate who we are to others and ourselves. 

In this module, you'll explore how individuals and collectives have presented aspects of identity through and in music performance, participation, description, and appreciation. You'll first engage with fundamental theoretical questions about the nature of identity, and then work on models for describing our own positions and identities in relation to music activity and practice. Using written and recorded materials, we will explore themes of age, gender, ethnicity, class, race, sexuality, and physicality.   

You'll be encouraged to supplement these materials with examples of your own, to be discussed in lectures and seminars. The module draws from theoretical debates in musicology, sociology and cultural studies, and encourages a critical and reflexive approach to questions of identity. 

‘Electroacoustic Composition’ introduces temporal development in composition and explores the analysis and composition of Electroacoustic Music. 

This module will introduce you to Electroacoustic Music. You'll be exposed to historical and contemporary works in the field through class lectures. You'll discuss musical aesthetics and form in seminars, using several strategies and concepts such as diagramming techniques, spectromophology, and auditory scene analysis.

Over the course of the term, you'll analyse a piece of Electroacoustic Music and compose either two medium works or one longer form piece with support in the form of composition tutorials. Topics covered in lectures may include:

• Text-Sound Composition
• Musique Concrete
• Acousmatic Composition
• Soundscape Composition
• Mixed Music
• Experimental Electronic Music.  

In order to succeed in this module, you must be able to work independently with sound editing and sequencing software such as Logic Audio, Pro Tools, Reaper, or Ableton. 

Indicative repertoire: 

• Blackburn, Manuella. (2017) Petites étincelle.
• Francis Dhomant. (2020) Images nomads.
• Halim El-Dabh, Halim. Ta'abir al-Zaar. ‘Halim El-Dabh : Wire Recorder Piece.’ soundart.zone.
• Henry, Pierre and Pierre Schaeffer (2010) Panorama de Musique Concréte. Cherry Red Records. CDHerndon, Holly. (2016) Platform.
• Stockhausen, Karlheinz. (1964; 2002) Kontakte.
• Spiegel, Laurie. (1980). Appalachian Grove I.
• Pade, Else Marie. (2014) Electronic Works 1958-1995.

This module will introduce you to some of the key experimental methods for creating sounds within the realm of Sonic Art. You'll focus on practical aspects, with some historical and creative context.

You'll be taught through a series of lectures and workshops in which you'll experiment with these methods, some of which will be selected for your assignment submissions. These aspects are supported by one-to-one tutorials. Areas covered may include:

• Field recording practices and mics as tools (contact mic, coil mic, hydrophones)
• Working with feedback and drones
• Hardware electronics, circuit bending
• Improvisation as method
• Synthesizers
• Ceative processing.  

In order to succeed in this module, you must be able to work independently with sound editing and sequencing software such as Logic Audio, Pro Tools, Reaper, or Ableton. 

Indicative repertoire:

• Feshareki, Shiva (2019)  New Forms.
• Hayes, Lauren Sarah. (n.d.) ‘live’.
• Lucier, Alivn. (1969; 1993)  I Am Sitting In A Room.
• Nakamura, Toshimaru. (2000) No Input Mixing Board.
• McNinch, Nathan. (2003) Frame/Tone.
• Oliveros, Pauline. (2012) Electronic Works 1965/66.
• Onda, Aki.  (2011) Cassette.
• Pamela Z (2004) Delay Is Better.
• Radigue, Éliane (2018) .Feedback Works 1969-1970.
• Radio 13. (2018) ‘Explore Sound With Abstract Turntablist Maria Chávez In Auckland’.
• Reich, Steve. (1987) The Early Work.
• Winderen Jana. (2018) Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone.

Techniques in Jazz & Popular Music provides you with an introduction to the harmonic, melodic and rhythmic vocabulary of jazz and commercial music.

You'll study:

• Tonality
• Standard chord progressions
• Chord/scale relationships
• Chord voicings and voiceleading
• Modes
• Extended chords
• Basic reharmonisation.

You'll be instructed in the conventions of jazz and popular music notation, including the presentation of lead sheets and full scores. You'll be taught through lectures and tutorials at the end of the term. 

Co-requisite module: Arranging and Composing for the Jazz Ensemble

This module will introduce you to a range of techniques and approaches in arranging and composing for jazz ensemble contexts, including knowledge of instrumentation and arrangement for standard brass and reed groupings and incorporation of the string ensemble and voice.

You'll gain an understanding of conventional scoring and voicing techniques, the use of extended harmony, modes and counterpoint, thickened line and chord spreads, as well as various arranging and composition concepts appropriate to Jazz rhythm section, frontline, voice and strings.   

The Sibelius notation program is used as the main music preparation tool. You'll complete a workbook exercise, followed by a second assignment where a complete arrangement for a medium size ensemble is developed in full score from a lead sheet (original composition or extant) and recorded by a department Jazz ensemble as part of your submission.

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

This module highlights a range of recording and production techniques and music technology, focusing on sequencing, sampling, synthesis, multi-track recording, use of a mixing desk, audio and MIDI effects, and microphones.

More centrally, the module introduces and interrogates the key aesthetic concepts that underlie contemporary production, and encompasses the diversity of methodologies in modern pop production from DIY/lo-fi artist to bedroom producer to conventional studio. You'll explore and develop imaginative and innovative production techniques in a supportive environment, and ultimately sets them upon a path to developing your own voice and identity as composer/producers.

This module will develop the knowledge you acquired in the module ‘Music in Film’. You'll further explore the function of music in relation to other media, through practical composition work. By working with music technology software, you'll be introduced to a number of technical and creative approaches to the composition of music for media, such as:

• Narrative film and TV
• Documentary
• Videogames
• Production music
• Commercials
• Podcasts.

You'll study core concepts, such as the role of synchronisation and illustration, awareness of genre, and how elements combine in multimedia forms. You'll get to grips with practical composition strategies including the use of thematic organisation, temp tracks, orchestration/arrangement/production, and working to instruction on a tight deadline. Theory will be brought to life with case studies from a number of prescribed films and videos.

Elements of business practices and the organisation and logistics of film scoring will be covered in lectures. You'll work towards your final submission of a showreel of three pieces (to film or game) accompanied by a PDF commentary based on a template provided.

Pre-requisite: Music in Film

The co-requisite for this module is Level 2 Music in Film.

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.

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. ' 

When watching a major Hollywood film, we're often so engrossed in the action that we fail to hear the soundtrack that underpins it. And yet this inaudible music can fundamentally change how we read a film. These unheard soundtracks have prompted a debate that has raged for 30 years: is the music there simply to cover up awkward silences in the cinema? Or is it there to disguise editing and temporal jumps in the image? Some have even claimed that soundtrack appeals to our subconscious, causing us to regress into a state more susceptible to the onscreen fantasy.

In this module, you'll explore the phenomenon of film music and the theory that has accompanied it through various genres, and will encourage active engagement in interdisciplinary study. You'll be introduced to a number of perspectives on the use, function and reception of music in (primarily) narrative film. This will include a discussion of practices from the so-called 'silent era' through to contemporary mainstream Hollywood cinema; exploration of the distinctions between the deployment of dramatic scoring and pre-existent music; the position of music in film's narrative fabric; and the interaction between music and other elements of film sound. Key concepts and theorists in film music and film sound scholarship will be introduced, and the module will be supported by engagement with significant literature. 

Seminar groups after each lecture will engage in exploratory tasks, and will provide preparation and advice for the main assignment, which requires you to develop a critical and analytical reading of the music and sound in a film of your choice.  

This module takes its cue from the 1956 Columbia album What is Jazz?, on which Leonard Bernstein – by that time one of America’s most famous musicians and public educators – delivers a lecture on the music’s technical and stylistic features. Blue notes, vocalised instrumental tones, and the transformation of song material through improvisation, all these things are illustrated by Bernstein’s guests across a variety of styles, and the programme ends with Miles Davis and John Coltrane pitching an old pop tune into a supermodern vortex of altered chords and right-angle phrasing.

This, then, was jazz, or at least the part of it that Bernstein called ‘the music itself’. But what would become of jazz later, when many of its musicians discarded those supposedly fundamental techniques, indeed refused the J-word altogether? And what is jazz when considered as a set of both musical and social practices? After all, the music has been taken by its players and listeners as sounding certain worldviews, whether hedonistic or abstruse; it has been imagined as a mode of political action, whether that meant opting out or acting up; it has provided ways of thinking about the individual and the collective, whether in critical metaphor or musical practice. 

In this module, you'll use musical analysis and readings to examine jazz’s developing cultural situation, from its beginnings to the present day. Central considerations are the music’s changing learning, performance and institutional contexts and prestige; its understanding as both an American and a global phenomenon; its functioning as a lens through which to envisage (and distort) ideas of race, gender and sexuality; its visual, verbal and sonic representations of attitude and style. This thematic approach will be complemented by listening and reading tasks which, focusing on specific moments or practices and progressing chronologically, will enrich our understanding of jazz’s historical development.

This part of the module pays homage to jazz’s hallowed names and recordings, but it also encourages students to think critically about the music’s canons. That means extending them stylistically, geographically and longitudinally: arriving at the present, we will think about how some enduring jazz impulse has been seen to animate the music of artists as different as Amy Winehouse and Kendrick Lamar, Esperanza Spalding and Jamie Cullum. 

In this module, you'll focus on the relationship between concepts and making by exploring some of the key concepts in sonic art, and how they continue to engender and stimulate creative practice. You'll explore how we might translate our own concepts into practice and/or scholarly reflections and have a chance to engage with some of the unique sonic art archives held at Goldsmiths, for instance, Longplayer, Daphhe Oram, Lily Greenham, Hugh Davies, Women's Revolutions Per Minute.  

Through lectures, seminars, an archival visit and one-to-one tutorials, you'll examine topics such as:

• Listening and walking practices
• Sound and the environment, site-specificity
• Sound installation
• The politics of sound
• Sound objects and instrument making
• Performativity and liveness
• Durational art.

For the assessment, you'll have the chance to create either a piece of sonic art with an accompanying commentary, or an essay exploring topics discussed in class.

Combining historical, musicological and sociological perspectives, this module focuses on the musics of, within, and circulating across East Asian countries (mainly China [including Taiwan], Japan and South Korea), within the context of debates and theoretical discussions concerning industry, geo-politics, technology, and musical practice, style and form. 

You'll approach East Asia as a distinct transnational production and cultural space. That region is nevertheless fraught with enduring historical tensions, not only internally but also elsewhere, as these countries are located within a further series of outer-national and global relationships across Australasia, Eurasia and the Americas. In broad terms, East Asian music will be explored via debates that engage with such themes as: modernity and tradition; Confucianism, communism and capitalism; Buddhism and Christianity; imperialism (in its many cultural, political, and economic guises); colonial modernity; Asianization; and the long post-colonial period. A number of key moments, musicians, songs, compositions and events will be used to explore the varied dynamics and historical legacies that feed into the creation, circulation and consumption of music. 

You'll develop your ability to critically understand how musics are constituted within, yet also contribute to, specific cultural, political and social circumstances and relationships. The module will enable you to address issues of musical form and practice, and relate this to a range of debates about creativity, style, representation, cultural expression and appropriation. You'll consider the ways in which all musics are shaped by various moral economies and regulatory frameworks. By shifting away from the Western-centric view, the module will increase students’ awareness of the concerns of diversity and the varied experiences of colonisation.  

The module will introduce you to the diverse musical traditions of Africa and Asia. You'll concentrate on traditional musical practices and their transformation in a global context, as well as newly created styles.

You'll be expected to become familiar with various types of music from geographical areas like Southern Africa, West Africa, North Africa, Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Oceania and East Asia.

Engaging with key issues and themes in ethnomusicology, the module will promote an understanding of the underlying structural principles and aesthetics of different musical styles and the social and cultural contexts in which they are performed.

This module will challenge you to think critically about how you can pitch a creative business idea. Central to this module is understanding that businesses can be thought of as innovative responses to problems. You'll develop key contextualisation skills as you will be required to evidence the existence of demand and articulate the meaning and value that their business ideas engenders.

You'll explore a range of interdisciplinary analytical tools throughout the module which act as prisms through which businesses in sectors from across the creative arts (including music, theatre, fashion, film, dance, etc.), the technology industries, and beyond can be evaluated, and their rationale as potential mechanisms for social change explored. These include economic/management ideas such as understanding competition and measuring impact, sociological ideas of cultural and social capital, applied business tools such as the Lean Start-Up method, historical ideas of market change, and psychological ideas of consumer empathy and motivation.

You'll learn the skills involved in developing and writing a business pitch, and thinking critically about the viability of your idea using the broad range of tools they are exposed to throughout the module. The other key assessment offers the opportunity for interdisciplinary project-based group work, where you will be offered the flexibility to choose both the topic for study and the method of application (including a case study, evaluation of academic journal articles, or an independent primary research project).

Lots of students join Goldsmiths because they want to make a difference in society, to bring about positive change and develop skills and experiences which will allow them to access exciting careers. Goldsmiths’ Social Change module will allow you to do work on group projects with students from other departments to bring about change. You’ll be introduced to the UN’s Sustainable Development goals and core project management theories and practices allow you to work across a number of weeks towards a final Festival of Ideas where you’ll report work back to the academic and local community.

Our academic departments are developing exciting elective ideas to allow you to broaden your education, either to develop vocationally orientated experiences or to learn more about contemporary society, culture and politics. You’ll be able to choose safe in the knowledge that these modules have been designed for non-subject specialists and to bring students from different disciplines together. For example, you may want to take introductions to areas such as Law, Education, the digital industries, the creative industries,think like a designer or understand the history and politics behind our current affairs.

In Creative Performance, you'll be encouraged to develop creative, rather than imitative approaches to performance. You'll participate in a range of Workshops and Masterclasses intended to develop musicianship, technique, originality, and performance presentation.

You'll work individually or as part of a duo to submit a Creative Manifesto stating the aims of the performance assessment. Personal or duo tutorial support is provided for both the Manifesto Presentation and the Degree show Performance.

You'll be supported to consider strategies for performance, music industry contexts, independent creative practice, musical and artistic context, collaboration, technologies for making and development of creative work for presentation.

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.

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 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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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. ' 

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 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 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. 

This module will introduce you to the principles, ethics and practice of participatory music. You'll gain an understanding of the range of ways music can be used for educational, community and therapeutic outcomes and provides them with a knowledge and understanding of workshop and other creative methodologies. You'll explore a range of career possibilities in participatory music, encouraging professional self-reflection and personal skills analysis. You'll gain a practical overview of how music projects can be structured and delivered for the benefit of varied client groups, and may feed into the module ‘Music Workshop Skills’, where you can put your knowledge into practice. The philosophies of creative engagement, musical inclusion, achieving therapeutic outcomes, formal, informal and non-formal learning and decolonisation will be explored. 

Indicative topics for this module will include:

• The history, principles and ethics of participatory music making, music therapy and community music
• National plan for youth music
• The contexts and organisational structures of these musics
• Creative methodologies
• Safeguarding and professional development
• Singing for health and vocal leadership
• Youth music
• Music in healthcare
• Music and refugees
• Music and dementia
• Formal and informal pedagogy
• Disability and breaking down barriers
• Music as therapy.  

The module aims to introduce you to a range of musical materials that you can adapt to use in a variety of community contexts. It will also help you to develop your leadership and transmission skills including devising, developing, planning and delivering music workshops to assist participant individuals and groups to effect personal and social growth and change.

You'll take part and have opportunities to lead practical musical workshop activities derived from a wide range of sources as well as share your own ideas for workshops.  You'll gain an increased understanding of the particular contexts of participatory music making including a range of current thinking and issues, such as the decolonisation of music and music education. You'll have the opportunity to reflect on your own skills and develop new ones including teaching, facilitation, delivery, planning and evaluation and encourage a reflective and inclusive mindset. 

You'll cover such topics as:

• Improvisation for musical & clinical outcomes
• Using graphic scores and minimalism
• Soundscapes and soundtracks
• Genre-based musicking
• Facilitating songwriting
• Songs and other vocal work
• Planning
• Evaluation
• Inclusive leadership and group work. 

Drawing from developmental psychology, sociology and educational theory, Music Teaching Skills gives you the opportunity to explore theoretical and practical approaches to instrumental/vocal teaching, with a particular focus on how pedagogy can promote inclusivity and social justice in formal and non-formal group and 1-1 contexts.

The module is delivered through a range of methods (lectures, seminars, workshops, students' presentations and tutorials). A core component of the module is the partnership with external local and/or national institutions/organizations, which gives students the opportunity to develop key employability skills through placements alongside experienced practitioners.

Historically, music has formed an integral part of many interdisciplinary artistic endeavors, including opera, dance, theatre and film. This module acknowledges these historical relationships and broadens its focus to include post-digital culture in which many creative skills have become comparable and transferable.

You'll explore the rise across the twentieth century of autonomous artists working with a number of media (digital or otherwise), rather than specialising in or being limited to a single field. The module aims to equip you with conceptual and practical approaches to work across disciplines of your choosing in this contemporary creative landscape, reflecting their existing skills and creative interests.

It will further offer conceptual frameworks for approaching, analysing, and critiquing such ways of working, and offer you opportunities for collaboration and explorative ways of co-operative, creative working.

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.

This module aims to provide experiential learning opportunities that both enhance students’ academic studies and offer the opportunity for personal development. It will therefore be an effective vehicle for delivering key aspects of Goldsmiths Learning and Teaching Strategy (Employability), including: · The teaching and evaluation of skills relevant both to academic achievement and to discipline-related career opportunities · The delivery of effective personal development programmes · The enhancement of academic programmes so that career-related experiences are offered, validated and supported An advantage of this model is that it draws on the expertise of the department of Theatre and Performance in facilitating students’ academic development and of the Work Placement Manager in working on their personal development. The module is convened by a member of academic staff in Theatre and Performance and delivered by the WPM and an academic tutor from the department. The academic elements will be delivered and assessed by the academic tutor and the personal development elements by WPM. It falls within the purview of the assessment framework, including exam boards and external assessors. The convenor and WPM will be invited to the Exam Board

This module addresses core skills and debates in the creative management of an entrepreneurial career. From capitalising upon creativity through reflexive auditing and personal brand strategy development, exploring mental health in the creative industries and developing mental wellness toolkits, and thinking about the cost of living and housing, the module prepares you for creative futures in a high-growth, high-uncertainty environment. 

Blending rigorous study of academic theory with highly detailed practical knowledge derived from empirical research, the module engages concepts from disciplines of management, art, philosophy, sociology and business, to develop knowledge of holistic approaches to an intensely competitive sector. Material is delivered in lectures involving worked case examples which are complemented with seminar sessions to unpack theories and ensure students can apply them to individual thinking approaches. 

Topics of co-creation and collaboration, portfolio careers, and valuation are examined with close attention to the manner and impact of digital mediation on such endeavours. Bridging the social study of technology and philosophy of creativity, alongside practice-based heuristics for entrepreneurship, the module gives you well-rounded knowledge for a future in the creative industries or creativity in any industry. 

This module aims to provide you with an introduction to the study of music psychology. Lectures will focus on the perception, cognition and neural basis of musical understanding, perception of musical structure and emotions and theories about music’s evolutionary roots.

The scientific methods used in research will be explored in a research participation session and in lectures. The module will introduce you to music psychology. Lectures will focus on four main themes:

• Musical perception and cognition
• Musical cognition and learning
• Musical origins and emotions in music
• Musical creativity.