Music Performance | BA (Hons) Degree

Western popular music has developed a canon of standards and conventions, based on the musical language of classical music and incorporating elements from a range of other cultures. This unit aims to develop an awareness of these conventions and their application in our modern technological environment.

This unit will develop your knowledge, confidence and skills in the area of Artist Development, whether you aim to be a performer, a producer, creator, or to promote some or all of the above.

The unit will include:

• Songwriting, track creation, composition, arrangement.
• The music business context: labels, publishers, management, DIY
• Establishing our creative community
• Working independently in the creation of new repertoire
• Collaboration in the creation of new repertoire
• Team building for artists, producers, performers and managers.
• Well being and Mental Health for music practitioners
• Development of a personal voice, musical language
• Establishing an artist brand
• Identifying gaps in skills and knowledge and planning effectively to fill those gaps
• Instrumental technique lessons, Musical direction
• Performance skills - stage presence, dynamics, timbre, tone, control of sound, interaction with/sensitivity to other performers, professionalism

This unit consists of lectures, workshops and seminars engaging you with a wide range ideas and theories relevant and applicable to your chosen discipline. The unit will  build on your pre-existing knowledge by : 

1. Introducing you to scholarly work, creative ideas and critical thinking skills that both lead and enrich your music practice. 
2. Encouraging you to identify, examine and define the constituent elements of your discipline. You will explore how those elements are constructed.
3. Promoting formal consideration of the effects of your discipline and practice on the ‘everyday’.
4. Facilitating and promoting a space for critical debate of foundational texts and fundamental principles of critical thinking in relation to your discipline and practice.

Ultimately, this unit encourages you to critically reflect on the desired effect of your practice.

This unit will build on your knowledge of standards and conventions, identifying specific tools and techniques that will help you to realise your music in a variety of contemporary contexts. You will also investigate various methods of communicating your ideas to other musicians and your target audience.

This unit will introduce you to more advanced techniques of composition and arrangement, examining more complex arrangements and different combinations of instruments or voices. Analysis of various subgenres will highlight specific elements that define each style, encouraging greater attention to detail in your own work.

This unit will provide you with the necessary skills to operate effectively  in existing professional and public contexts and to proactively seek opportunities to identify and define future applications or locations for your emerging practice. The Project provides the opportunity for you to work with peers, engage in a community of practice and consider your own and others’ disciplines.

You will connect with others to expand your opportunities to present and create challenging and ambitious music, events, products, commercial ventures and propositions; with the view to establishing an agile, sustainable and informed practice that may contribute to cultural or commercial culture.

This unit is designed to develop techniques of arranging and orchestration in a rock/pop/jazz environment. You will build on the basic arranging techniques studied at Level 4, introducing more complex harmony and instrumentation. The unit will also investigate more advanced western popular music styles, such as orchestrated pop and jazz.

This unit is designed to develop techniques of improvisation. You will investigate a range of approaches to improvisation across a broad spectrum of social, historical and geographical cultures, as well as more familiar jazz/R&B styles. The unit will examine the relationship between chords and scale/melody, rhythmic phrasing and more oblique approaches to improvisation.

This unit encourages you to situate yourself within your practice. The unit asks questions about what we, as practitioners - as well as ‘beings’ in the world - bring to our respective disciplines and to the texts we perform, prosume and market to an audience. You are encouraged to attune your listening, thinking, reading and writing skills so that a range of subjects can be thoughtfully debated.

The Individual Project is your opportunity to engage in a sustained project that aims to allow your personal voice, ambitions and intentions in Music to emerge. You may demonstrate advanced musical technique with a high level of critical analysis.

Collective Practice provides the creative and practical space for you to develop and present refined, professional musical and commercial outcomes. Collaborative working provides an initial setting for you to engage in professional practice with peers or external networks, producing outcomes such as events, music releases, films, games, programmes, performance, festivals.

The dissertation is an investigation and critical discourse on your negotiated choice of a topic relevant to your course of study. Your dissertation on your chosen topic is assessed on submission of a written document or an oral presentation.

Professional Practice is an opportunity to plan and prepare for progression from the course onto next steps, whether those be on to further study, to employment, self-employment, founding a business, or combination of all or any of the above as appropriate to your development and ambitions

This unit will provide a range of different experiences, depending on the nature of your professional aims. Many students engage very successfully with local and national and virtual global events that support the production of new music and professional networks.

This unit allows you to explore the development of your own individual style, through analysis of your influences, identification of specific techniques or approaches that you are applying to your own work and the practical demonstration of that application in a live or recorded performance.