Our MA in Music allows students to choose between pathways in:

• Music and Popular Culture
• Music on Stage and on Screen
• Contemporary Practice in Composition
• Music in 19th-Century Culture (new for 2011).

AHRC fully funded studentship for this course currently available (closing date 24 June). Follow this link

On our MA in Music you will take part in lively seminars, workshops and tutorials and gain an in-depth understanding of recent critical debates, scholarship and practice in your chosen area of music. You will receive a thorough grounding in advanced musical studies and have the opportunity to undertake independent research in your own particular area of interest.

Studying for an MA will enhance your career prospects as well as providing you with many vital transferable skills. Our MA can, where desired, pave the way to doctoral research.

We are a friendly, forward-thinking and research-driven department. Teaching is delivered by faculty members who have produced internationally-recognised research.

Why should you study Music at Oxford Brookes University?

Our MA programme offers you:

• An internationally respected postgraduate degree qualification

• Enhanced employment prospects and valuable transferable skills

• The option to study full or part time, and to fit your studies around work and family commitments

• Exciting, original and flexible study pathways

• Research-led teaching by subject experts

• Varied and innovative teaching methods and the opportunity to join interdisciplinary research clusters

• Access to Oxford’s world-renowned research facilities and to a thriving local music scene

• A supportive and friendly department

Our pathways

All students take a compulsory core module, Key Concepts and Methods in Research, and two specialist modules. The Music team offers a broad programme of electives spanning musicology and composition. Candidates also submit a dissertation on an approved topic or a portfolio of compositions.

There are four MA pathways to choose from:

• Music and Popular Culture
• Music on Stage and on Screen
• Contemporary Practice in Composition
• Music in 19th-Century Culture

The pathway is determined by your choice of elective modules and your dissertation topic.

The electives on offer will include the following:

Key Concepts and Methods in Research (Compulsory)

This module provides a grounding in the skills, methodologies and theoretical approaches for work in Music at postgraduate level.

Approaches to Film Music

This elective explores in detail a number of scholarly and creative perspectives on the role of music in film. Rather than tracing the history of music in film, the module surveys recent critical thinking about music in film: how music is thought to clarify, confuse or contradict the expressive or informative content of the image track; how music is understood to generate impressions of time, space, character, mood, scene. Sessions will involve group discussion of weekly readings, as well as student presentations on specific films and themes.

Approaches to Opera

This elective explores recent critical thinking about the creation, performance and reception of opera. Amongst other topics, it will focus upon debates about the following issues: the social and aesthetic contexts that have shaped operas; the representation of political concerns in opera; gender and sexuality on the operatic stage; institutions and audiences; the staging and reinterpretation of operas; critical responses to opera and ways of interpreting opera; opera's place in the musical canon; and the role of opera in the twenty first century. Other forms of music theatre may also be discussed. Sessions will involve group discussion of weekly readings, as well as student presentations on specific operas or themes.

Approaches to 19th-Century Music

This elective (new for 2011) will cover a wide range of nineteenth-century musical repertories and will give you the opportunity to examine correlations between music, literature and art. Topics to be explored include concert life and music festivals; institutions and audiences; domestic music making; gender; and the notion of ‘genius’ in 19th-century thought.

Approaches to Popular Music

This elective will focus on the song-based lineages of American country and British folk music, American blues and gospel music, and the trans-national languages of pop, rock and rap. Musicological approaches are practised through active listening to selected recordings and live performances. Popular music is positioned as a sub-discipline of various non-musical subject areas: sociology and politics, literary study, cultural and media studies, aesthetics and critical theory. Issues in historiography are implicit throughout, as are discussions of definitions of so-called popular music.

Composition and Sonic Art Practice

This elective will provide an opportunity for students to enhance their technical and analytical skills, building upon their previous experience as composers. Students will have the opportunity to focus upon acoustic composition, electro-acoustic composition and sound art, and will explore the importance of site and context. They will develop their own conceptual concerns and expand their vocabulary of technical skills as they relate to a specific aspect of their creative practice. Students will develop a body of practical research - to include scores and recordings - and reflect upon this through seminar feedback sessions. In addition, students pursue a research topic that explores contemporary practice; for instance through the analytical study of the work of a composer or group of composers, or a detailed consideration of a particular conceptual or technical issue.

Electroacoustic and Live Electronic Music

This elective will explore theoretical and practical issues in electroacoustic / acousmatic music and computer supported interactive music. The elective will involve the study of key works and of technical and aesthetic issues. Students will give presentations and will develop a composition and/or piece of software.

Dissertation (Compulsory)

An extended piece of written work or portfolio of compositions developed in training sessions and then completed through individual research and study in tutorials with a suitable member of staff.