Music BA (Hons)

Program Overview

It emphasizes flexibility, allowing students to tailor their studies to their individual interests and career aspirations, preparing them for a wide range of opportunities in the music industry and beyond.

Program Outline

The program emphasizes flexibility, allowing students to tailor their studies to their individual interests and career aspirations.

Objectives:

• Develop a critical understanding of music from diverse aesthetic, cultural, and social perspectives.
• Enhance proficiency in performance and composition.
• Acquire academic research skills.
• Cultivate critical and cultural awareness.
• Develop the ability to devise and sustain complex arguments.
• Improve written and oral communication and presentation skills.
• Foster creativity.
• Enhance time management and organizational skills.

Outline:

Year One:

• Compulsory Modules:
• Introduction to Classical Music History (MUSI130):
This module provides a foundation in the history of Western art music since the Baroque era, covering key composers, genres, structures, and contextual issues.
• Music as an Industry (MUSI150): This module introduces students to the structure, history, and contemporary challenges of the music industries, exploring potential careers and key debates around the commodification of music.
• Music in Contexts: Why Music Matters (MUSI121): This module examines the function and meaning of music in various cultural contexts, introducing different academic approaches and methods for studying music in relation to culture.
• Optional Modules:
• Classical Performance 1 (MUSI102):
This module enhances practical performance skills through structured frameworks, individual lessons, and development of technical, aural, practice, and performative skills.
• Classical Composition 1 (MUSI106): This module provides historical and practical knowledge of contrapuntal techniques in music composition, culminating in an original composition centered around contrapuntal writing.
• Foundations in Tonal Harmony (MUSI181): This module bridges the gap between A Level music theory and university-level requirements, reviewing fundamental elements of Western classical music theory and developing a deeper understanding of their relationships.
• Introduction to Digital Audio Workstations (MUSI109): This module introduces MIDI sequencing in Logic Pro and Ableton Live, covering topics such as recording and editing MIDI, effects processors, mixing, software synthesis, and sampler instruments.
• Introduction to Sound and Music in Audiovisual Media (MUSI170): This module explores the use and role of music in audiovisual media, focusing on the sound and music of mainstream narrative cinema.
• Introduction to Sound and Technology (MUSI171): This module introduces the basic principles of sound, acoustics, and music technology, covering concepts such as analogue and digital audio theory, key electronics theories, and sound measurement systems.
• Introduction to Sound Recording and Production (MUSI108): This module introduces sound recording and production techniques in the University Recording Studio, delivered through hands-on workshops and lectures.
• Popular Music Theory in Practice (MUSI182): This module provides a practical and constructive course in music theory, with specific reference to the practical needs of popular musicians.
• Popular Performance 1 (MUSI104): This module explores issues in popular music performance.
• The History of Electronic Music (MUSI172): This module covers the history of electronic music, from musique concrete to contemporary noise music.
• Theory in Practice: Exploring Music’s Construction (MUSI180): This module examines repertoires from popular music, the classical era, and film, focusing on how harmony, chord progressions, and pitch are organized.
• Popular Composition 1 (MUSI107): This module develops a practical understanding of compositional techniques in songwriting since the beginning of the recording age, focusing on popular composition since 1950.

Year Two:

• Compulsory Modules:
• Professional and Career Development (SOTA260):
This module prepares students for a smooth transition into a work placement year and develops lifelong skills, attitudes, and behaviors.
• Optional Modules:
• Classical Performance 2A (MUSI201):
This module continues to develop students' performance skills, with a particular emphasis on developing technique and an awareness of historical performance practices.
• Classical Performance 2B (MUSI202): This module continues to improve upon the listening and technical skills developed during Semester One, delving further into the relationship between theory, technique, and a mature professional approach to the practice of each student's individual instrument.
• Classical Composition 2 (MUSI207): This module provides experience composing original classical or contemporary music for two different small ensembles from the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic.
• Contemporary Genres (MUSI263): This module introduces critical perspectives on current developments in popular music, examining various genres and subgenres of contemporary popular music.
• Exploring Harmony, Chord Progression and Pitch (MUSI280): This module examines music across different repertoires, focusing on how harmony, chord progressions, and pitch are organized.
• Global Pop: Popular Musics of the World (MUSI261): This module explores the development of popular musics of the world, with particular emphasis on popular music genres and styles of non-Anglophone origins.
• Introduction to Conducting (MUSI200): This module introduces students to the process, skills, and approaches expected when conducting instrumental or choral ensembles.
• Introduction to Music Psychology (MUSI290): This module introduces key contemporary topics and research in music psychology, including the origins of music, music and emotion, the brain on music, musical development, music and cognitive performance, and music and health.
• Live Sound (MUSI214): This module introduces students to live sound technology and the practical skills needed to competently and safely operate a live sound system.
• Music in Gaming (MUSI273): This module examines the function and design of music in video games, considering the historical development of music in gaming, the relationship between game-music and technological advance, and the role and function of music in different types of game.
• Music in World Cinema (MUSI270): This module explores the musical practices of film traditions outside the Anglophone world and their cultural contexts, with particular emphasis on comparisons to classical Hollywood practice.
• Musical Theatre (MUSI274): This module studies musical theatre in its twentieth/twenty-first century context.
• Opera and Politics (MUSI232): This module considers the relationship between opera and politics, both broadly conceived, with a view to understanding operatic responses to political developments and the response to opera in political contexts.
• Popular Music Composition 2 (MUSI210): This module aims to continue the process of exposing students to models of songwriting and composition from a broad array of popular music, underpinned with a solid and practical theoretical grounding.
• Popular Performance 2A (MUSI203): This module explores issues in popular music performance, including development of individual instrumental and vocal skills as well as ensemble playing and group dynamics.
• Popular Performance 2B (MUSI204): This module explores issues in popular music performance, including development of individual instrumental and vocal skills as well as ensemble playing and group dynamics.
• Post-Wagnerian Music and Philosophy (MUSI230): This module studies music by composers writing under the influence of Richard Wagner, whose philosophy of life and music influenced much of fin de siecle Europe.
• Sampling and Remixing (MUSI213): This module teaches students techniques for mixing and remixing, using samples, stems, or tracks from existing songs.
• Foley and Sound Design (MUSI208): This module introduces students to sound recording, audio editing, and sound transformation in a DAW in the context of sound design for the moving image.
• Sound Recording and Production 2 (MUSI243): This module extends students' knowledge of studio recording and production techniques, including stereo recording, editing, mixing tracks with problems, making timing and tuning adjustments, audio quantization, comping, and working with large multitrack projects.
• Sound, Technology, and Society (MUSI241): This course examines the ongoing relationship between technological development, popular music, and the cultures which surround it.
• Early musical cultures from the Islamicate court to the English Reformation (MUSI219): This module introduces students to a wide range of early cultures of song and instrumental music from before 1600.
• Working in Music Industry (MUSI252): This module introduces students to the various roles and jobs that exist in the music industry.
• Orchestration (MUSI216): This module provides experience arranging a variety of pre-existing musical excerpts for large orchestra.
• Becoming Entrepreneurial (ULMS254): This is a cross-disciplinary module focusing on the challenges of identifying, exploring, and implementing entrepreneurial opportunities that create and capture value.

Year Three:

• Compulsory Modules:
• Independent Project:
Students undertake a major independent project in research, performance, composition, or technology.
• At least one of the following:
• Beethoven's Life and Works (MUSI331): This module explores the music of Ludwig Van Beethoven, examining how and why it has captured the imaginations of listeners and critics.
• Curation and Heritage (MUSI353): This module considers how popular music is presented as heritage in different contexts, such as museum exhibitions, library collections, and DIY online archives.
• Optional Modules:
• Exploring Rhythm, Form, and Musical Time (MUSI380):
This module examines and explores musical form, rhythm, and time in a range of repertoires.
• Independent Project: Classical Performance (MUSI395): This module offers final-year students the chance to "major" in performance, where "performance" is loosely conceived to incorporate any genre of music as a solo or ensemble instrumentalist/vocalist, and also conducting/directing.
• Independent Project: Composition (MUSI397): This module offers final-year students the chance to create a substantial music composition with instruments.
• Independent Project: Creative Music Technology (MUSI396): This module allows students to design their own project to carry out across semesters 1 & 2 of Year 3.
• Independent Project: Popular Performance (MUSI398): This module offers final-year students the chance to "major" in popular performance, where "performance" is loosely conceived to incorporate any genre of popular music as a solo or group instrumentalist/vocalist.
• Independent Project: Research (MUSI399): This module is an extended research project in which students can concentrate in an in-depth manner on a particular issue or subject area.
• Jazz (MUSI341): This module covers jazz in the broadest sense of the genre, from its nineteenth/early twentieth century precursors to assessments of the present-day scene and its global significance.
• Popular Music Composition 3 (MUSI310): This module continues the process of investigating a range of tonal and rhythmic practices, some of which will have informed students' own music making.
• Sound Studies (MUSI322): This module introduces students to various theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of music and sound in their social and cultural contexts.
• The Film Music of John Williams (MUSI370): This module examines the film-music output of the composer John Williams, considering the historical development of his compositional style, in the context of Hollywood convention and the evolution of the "blockbuster."
• Self-management for the music industries (MUSI319): This final year module prepares students who want to work in any role within the music industries for the realities of managing the business aspects of developing a career in music.
• Advanced Live Sound (MUSI316): This module develops skills learned in MUSI214 and takes a more in-depth look at advanced live sound theory and practical techniques.
• Independent Project: Popular Composition (MUSI394): This module offers final-year students the chance to create a portfolio of popular compositions.

Assessment:

• Each module has an individually determined system of assessment, which may include coursework, written papers, tests, recitals, composition or technology portfolios, presentations, podcasts, examinations, and combinations of these.
• The assessment methods are selected to best suit the nature of the module.

Teaching:

• The program employs a range of teaching methods, including lectures, seminars, tutorials, workshops, master classes, 1-2-1 instrumental lessons, ensemble coaching, and online tasks and projects.
• The emphasis is on student participation and interaction.
• The most appropriate mode of teaching is selected for each subject, ensuring an enjoyable learning process that enables students to acquire useful and marketable skills and knowledge.

Careers:

• Studying music opens up many career opportunities, including jobs in music (from performance, composition, and production, through to teaching, music therapy, and community arts).
• Employers in many sectors are increasingly seeking arts and humanities graduates for their transferable skills.
• They learn the value of working with others towards a shared, finished product and a whole range of flexible, professional skills.
• Students have the opportunity to undertake work experience opportunities, such as work placements, a year in industry, and work in the student-run record label.

Other:

• The Department of Music is located in recently renovated facilities, including studios, teaching spaces, and industry-standard equipment.
• The department recently opened the Tung Auditorium, a 400-seat state-of-the-art performance venue.
• The department has a long history of excellence in classical music and established the Institute of Popular Music in 1988, the world's first specialist center for the study of Popular Music.
• Music was placed in the top quartile for impact classified as outstanding (4 ) in the REF 2021.
• The department is located in Liverpool, a vibrant musical city and former Capital of Culture.
• The department works closely with musical and cultural partners, including the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic.
• The department offers opportunities for students to study abroad at partner universities worldwide.
• The department offers a year in industry placement option for students.
• The department offers a range of scholarships and bursaries to provide tuition fee discounts and help with living expenses while at university.