OUR COURSES:
BA (Hons) Music
Course structure
Year 1
Performance Studies consists of first study lessons, optional second study lessons and keyboard support, together with workshops on performance techniques, aural awareness, and conducting.
Creative Forum is a composition skills module allowing free composition while focusing on a range of compositional techniques, notation, arranging, orchestration, and the use of music technology.
Rethinking Music includes study and research skills for musicians, analytical skills and the close study of landmark musical works and genres from medieval to pop, with a series of seminars around cultural and musicological issues in music today.
Year 2
You continue with Rethinking Music and take a specialist Professional Development course which includes work placements. A choice of four other modules builds on the acquisition, consolidation and development of musical skills, and encourages you to begin working in a specialist area matching your particular strengths, whether in performance, composition or musicology in classical or jazz styles.
- Performance and Teaching (includes classical and jazz streams)
- Musical Theatre Project
- Opera Project
- Creative Forum 3 (orchestration and arrangement)
- Creative Forum 4 (collaborative composition, including composing for Dance)
- Rethinking Music 3 (contemporary music, ethnomusicology and globalisation)
- Rethinking Music 4 (Jazz and Pop Musicology)
- Professional Development
Year 3
You have the freedom for originality and creative output in two Advanced Specialist modules (such as performance or composition) together with the choice of a wide range of supporting modules. In this way you can tailor your degree to your own interests with the help and support of Bath Spa University staff.
- Performance (includes classical and jazz streams)
- Rethinking Music 5 (Performance Practice or musicology of popular music)
- Rethinking Music 6 (18th and 19th Century Musicology or music for screen)
- Composition
- Ensemble
- Music in Action (Community Music)
- Musical Theatre Project
- Opera Project
- Dissertation or Lecture Recital
Teaching Methods and Resources
Music is taught through workshops, lectures, seminars, individual tutorials and instrumental/vocal lessons.
Practical workshops in performance and composition are given by distinguished full-time staff who are all practising performers, composers and musicologists. Clarinettist Roger Heaton is one of this country's foremost performers of new music, recording regularly for CD and radio, and was formerly Music Director and Conductor of Rambert Dance Company; Matthew Spring is a leading performer of early music with his group Sirinu, and his major book The Lute in Britain has recently been published by Oxford University Press. Charles Wiffen is a pianist and musicologist who has performed and recorded widely in the UK (including in the BBC Proms) and abroad and has previously taught at the Royal College of Music and Trinity College of Music in London.
Performance
Every week a day is dedicated to ensemble performance and related activities for students in all years, including choir (with Nigel Perrin), orchestra, wind band, big band and gamelan. There are numerous student performances through the year both at the Michael Tippett Centre, and in Bath and beyond. Each year the School promotes two major opera and musical theatre performances, in which music students take part. Recent performances have included three operas by American composers Philip Glass and Robert Moran, Mozart's The Magic Flute, Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera and Happy End, Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, Sondheim's Into The Woods and Handel's Semele.
Composition
Composition can be a major component of your degree (although it is compulsory in Year 1 for BA Music students only). All the composition modules aim to help you develop your own voice as a composer, whether working acoustically or electronically, for concert or installation, supported by a series of lectures, seminars, tutorials, and workshops with visiting composers and performers. Each year, we provide a range of performance opportunities so that you can hear your work performed by professional musicians and fellow students. This practical experience of composition is essential to your development, and we encourage you to hear your work wherever possible. Recent visitors include composers Gavin Bryars, Jonathan Dove, Graham Fitkin, Barrington, Pheloung, Howard Skempton and Mark-Anthony Turnage and performers Plus Minus Ensemble, Contemporary Consort, Ensemble Bash, New London Chamber Ensemble and Heaton-Wiffen-Wood Trio.
