You will study two core modules:
Advanced Performance
This is a module for advanced performers who are approaching a professional standard. Your skills will be honed through individual tuition with experts on your instrument/voice.
Assessment: You will present a lecture-recital involving a performance and a lecture presentation, and submit an extended essay version of the lecture
Performance Skills
This module has been specifically designed to address the extra-musical aspects of successful musical performances and is intended to complement and enhance performances given in your other performance modules.
The module runs across both semesters. In semester one, you will attend a series of seminars/workshops in the Department’s Music Health and Wellbeing series, which focus on the physical and psychological elements of performance. In the second semester, you will attend a series of ‘Performance Platform’ sessions, where you and your cohort will perform for one another, analyse each other’s performances, and receive feedback from professional specialists. Across both semesters you will also attend all six Barber Evening Concerts.
Assessment: 10-minute performance, two oral presentations, 3,000-word written assignment
You will also choose two optional modules from a range which typically includes:
Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art
This module consists of a critical examination of topics in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. It considers subjects such as: art and the nature of aesthetic experience; beauty, ugliness and the sublime; symbolism and allegory; the aesthetics of modernism. At its core is an overview of the German aesthetic tradition, involving a close reading of foundational texts by Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel and their contemporaries in the early 19th century. It will also consider work by a range of subsequent authors, such as, for example, Walter Benjamin, John Dewey, Ernst Bloch, Benedetto Croce, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Theodor Adorno and Martin Heidegger. Attention will be paid not only to the conceptual arguments put forward by the thinkers in question, but also to the ways in which their theoretical tenets have underpinned the interpretation and criticism of works of art, music and literature.
Assessment: Written assignment
Special Study in Music
You will undertake a special study of a particular field of your choice under the direction of the leader of your pathway, which will typically require attendance at an appropriate series of lectures or tutorials as well as independent reading and research. Topics for study might include: vocalists in the Baroque era; topics in music analysis; or topics in critical musicology.
Assessment: Written assignment
Studies in Performance Practice
This module combines the disciplines of musicology and performance, introducing you to the main topics in performance practice of western music. Case studies are devoted to Baroque, Classical, Romantic and twentieth-century music. The module will instruct develop the skills necessary for the PhD in Performance Practice. Topics covered may include organology, rhythm and tempo, articulation, pitch and temperaments, notation, the history of recorded performance and debates around ‘authenticity’ in performance.
Assessment: Two written assignments or a combination of written and practical assignments
Please note: A wider range of optional modules is available through the Open Pathway with Performance, but applicants for the Open Pathway with Performance should demonstrate in their application materials that they are sufficiently versatile to excel across the pathway’s more diverse range of optional modules.
Please note that the optional module information listed on the website for this programme is intended to be indicative, and the availability of optional modules may vary from year to year. Where a module is no longer available we will let you know as soon as we can and help you to make other choices.