Approaches to Composition and Performance

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module examines the intersection between composition, improvisation and live performance through a range of different contemporary approaches explored through practical experiment and criticial reflection.

The emphasis is on creative work explored through discussion and group and individual composition, improvisation and performance (using instrumental and vocal, and conventional and improvised/experimental 'instruments' and techniques). A number of set works in a variety of styles will provide focus and suggest developments of basic techniques, appropriate to individual interests.

You will engage in critical evaluation of these practices, and of each others work. You do not need to be an established instrumental or vocal performer or have prior experience of composition or improvisation to participate fully in the module.

Introduction to Music Studies: Harmony, Analysis and Context A

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module develops skills necessary both for understanding music through notated scores and for critiquing that approach to understanding music by introducing key concepts of how music is studied in its wider contextual spaces. The 30-credit version of the module has an additional weekly seminar that develops creative project responses to this knowledge. These may take the form of compositional, analytical and/or contextual responses to the material studied according to the interests the individual student wishes to explore in their excercises, creative projects and essays.

The module is divided into three progressive four-week modules. The first part explores the workings of tonal and post-tonal harmony, syntax, style and form building in a variety of musical styles. It develops an awareness of analytical and structural issues. The second part explores issues surrounding the analysis of musical scores, introducing the student to a number of established analytical methodologies including Schenkerian, pitch-class and semiotic analysis. The third module challenges many of the 'formalist' approaches explored in the first two modules by exploring so-called 'new musicology' approaches to the study of music. This module introduces newer contexts in which musicological enquiry is typically pursued today. This involves exploring music through its cultural, gender, sexuality, sociological, political, gestural etc. contexts and identities; approaches that are typically and historically supressed in much score-based enquiry.

This 30-credit version of the module has an additional one-hour seminar each week that develops and invites creative responses to the topics explored on the 15-credit version of the module and to a number of additional set works studied around the issues explored in each part.

Music and Society A

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

Music does not exist in isolation from society. Many cultures in the world have no word for music conceived as an entity distinct from the contexts in which it takes place; contexts such as social or religious ritual, dance or performance. Only in modern western culture has the idea of art music as something autonomous and removed from the everyday world evolved.

But in its production, distribution and reception music is always influenced by social forces: new technologies, economic conditions, the maintenance of social and cultural distinctions and value systems, changes in patterns of employment and leisure, even modes of transport. And as the world around us changes, so music itself responds to those changes.

How can we come to understand the intimate connections between music and society? Why is music meaningful to us, and how can we understand how music has meaning at all? What is the function of art music in cultures dominated by commercial values? How can we grasp the relationships between the multiplicity of musical forms that are available in a modern globalised culture? How can we evaluate the impact of the different media and technologies by which music is disseminated and consumed?

These are some of the questions that this module seeks to address. The module also aims to introduce you to different intellectual approaches to these questions, and to broaden your engagement with the issues through independent research.

Creative Production: Digital Media

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

Please note: space on Media Practice modules is very limited. Only students for whom a practice module is a requirement of their home institution's course will be considered for a place on these modules, and only then if places are available.

This module introduces you to interactive media and encourages you to reflect critically on issues of form and representation in relation to your own work. You learn key processes and techniques involved in producing a simple web project. You will work individually to realise set exercises in and out of class and produce a completed website to a specified brief.

Creative Production: Digital Media

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module will introduce you to using a range of desktop publishing tools in the creation of visual information design. You will learn, and critically reflect upon, key processes and techniques involved with visual research, page layout and composition incorporating the use of graphics and text. You will also work individually to produce a series of digital artefacts to a set brief.

Creative Production: Photography

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

Please note: space on Media Practice modules is very limited. Only students for whom a practice module is a requirement of their home institution's programme will be considered for a place on these modules, and only then if places are available.

This module introduces you to using the still image and encourages you to reflect critically on issues of form and representation in relation to your own work. You will learn key processes and techniques involved in digital imaging: research, composition, exposure, editing. You will work individually to on set exercises in and out of class and produce a completed series of images to a set brief.

Creative Production: Photography

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

Please note: space on Media Practice modules is very limited. Only students for whom a practice module is a requirement of their home institution's programme will be considered for a place on these modules, and only then if places are available.

This module introduces you to the still image and encourages you to reflect critically on issues of form and representation in relation to your own work. You will learn key processes and techniques involved in digital imaging: research, composition, exposure, and editing. You will work individually to complete set exercises both in and out of class, and produce a series of images to a set brief.

Creative Production: Sound

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module introduces you to sound production, and will encourage you to reflect critically on issues of form and representation in relation to your and others' work. You will learn key processes and techniques involved in sound design, such as research, acoustics, voice recording and editing. You will undertake exercises in and out of class, and produce a completed sound design piece to a set brief.

Creative Production: Sound

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module introduces you to sound production and will encourage you to reflect critically on issues of form and representation in relation to your and others' work. You will learn key processes and techniques involved in sound design, such as research, acoustics, voice recording and editing. You will undertake exercises in and out of class, and produce a completed sound design piece to a set brief.

Creative Production: Video

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

Please note: space on Media Practice modules is very limited. Only students for whom a practice module is a requirement of their home institution's programme will be considered for a place on these modules, and only then if places are available.

This module introduces you to narrative using the moving image and encourages you to reflect critically on issues of form and representation in relation to your own work. You will learn key processes and techniques involved in video production: research, scripting, camera, sound and editing. You will work in a team to complete set exercises both in and out of class and produce a video project to a set brief.

Creative Production: Video

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module will introduce you to using a range of desktop publishing tools in the creation of visual information design. You will learn, and critically reflect upon, key processes and techniques involved with visual research, page layout and composition incorporating the use of graphics and text. You will have the chance to work individually to produce a series of digital artefacts to a set brief.

Culture and the Everyday

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module explores 'doing culture' in everyday life. If the 'everyday' refers to the mundane, the unremarkable - to the forms of life routinely taken for granted - it is also through the practices of everyday life that we experience who we are, how our lives are invested with meanings and we engage with change. In the modern world (especially in the developed north), it is difficult to think about cultures of everyday life without also considering the media: its contribution to the structuring of daily life; its varied use in daily life; and its discursive construction and engagement with aspects of everyday life. The module introduces critical approaches to everyday life, including those engaging with media, before concentrating on a series of case studies. Topics are likely to be organised around the twin foci of 'embodiment' and 'mobility' and include, for example: getting dressed, meal times, time for love, driving and shopping. You will have the opportunity to reflect on your own experiences and to consider, where appropriate, media in relation to everyday life. In addition to this the module will also provide historical and cross-cultural material and encourage study of other cultures.

Film Analysis: Hollywood Narrative and Style

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

Film Analysis 1 explores the diverse uses to which filmmakers put such key techniques of cinematic expression as narrative, cinematography, mise-en-scene, editing, sound, performance and special effects. You will explore not simply how such techniques are accomplished (ie the creative choices available to filmmakers) but also the potential they have for generating meaning and pleasure when combined together to produce filmic texts. The module is based around a series of reading assignments, which will be discussed in seminars along with the week's set film and extracts from other films. In particular, Film Analysis 1 examines one of the most influential and most pervasive models of cinema: the classical narrative film produced during the era of the Hollywood studio system (from approximately 1915 to 1960). You will consider several films from this era, as well as films produced subsequently, in the light of influential propositions by David Bordwell and other film scholars regarding the systematic organisation of stylistic and narrative norms within classical Hollywood storytelling.

Introduction to Electronic Music

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module focuses on the history of electronic music, as broadly conceived to take in such topics as recordings, electronic instruments, musique concrète, elektronische Musik, electro acoustic music, analogue and digital synthesis, computer composition, audiovisuals, electronic dance music and electronica. You will cover representations and technology for electronic music, which will be treated alongside historical material, though without assuming prior mathematical or western score-reading knowledge. Analytic approaches will also be investigated with further consideration of psychological factors important to the perception and cognition of such music.

Making Music

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

Media, Music, Performance, Location: Making Site-Specific Artworks

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This is a practice-based module that will engage you in the making of site-specific performance in public spaces. You will explore through lectures and practical workshops the relation of space, place and sound, and the social meanings of specific locations. The module will examine a range of contemporary artistic approaches and theoretical ideas, as well as introducing you to practical methods for making site-specific work with music.

Popular Music Cultures

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module will provide you with an introduction to the critical discourses regarding jazz and popular music. This module will broaden your historical awareness and critical understanding of different traditions in jazz and popular music, although it is not designed to be a historical overview.

Likewise, while some technical understanding is required, the primary focus is not on minute analytical distinctions between different styles or practical instruction in song-writing, production or performance. Rather, we will concentrate on the social and cultural functions and meanings of the popular music cultures studied and the reasons why they exert such a powerful hold on audiences and practitioners alike.

Every week we will focus on a critical issue that has been central in discussions about popular and jazz music. Deliberately, these issues transcend the boundaries of style (or 'genre') and historical period. Thus, rather than honing in on the minutiae of individual styles, we will seek to contextualise them more broadly and see what, perhaps surprisingly, they have in common and what historical lineages connect them. It is the intention that this wider awareness of historical, social and cultural contexts will also enable those of you who are musicians to reflect more critically on their own artistic practice, thus enriching their work.

Practising Cultural Studies 1b

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module introduces you to the ways in which cultural studies as a theoretical approach can be used to explore aspects of life in the 'globalised world' of the 21st century. The first weeks are devoted to mapping and debating some of the terms cultural studies draws on. In the second half of the term you will try out cultural studies approaches in cross-cultural contexts through the exploration of three selected areas. These may include a social issue (eg migration or 'culture on the move'), a topic engaging with personal experience (eg 'passionate attachments' whether for people, things or ideas), or a topic engaging with cultural objects (eg focusing on the competition in relation to culture – the Turner prize, Booker or Young Musician of the Year on the one hand, Strictly Come Dancing or Master Chef on the other). You will undertake focused cross-disciplinary study through carefully directed research tasks and reading on these topics. Teaching and learning will involve a mix of lectures, seminars, workshops, screenings, individual and group work. Assessment is by submission of an exercise, essay, and group presentation.

Working with Film

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module is designed to help you to develop your study skills in preparation for working with film in more advanced ways in years 2 and 3 of your degree. The skills we will work on in particular include those of detailed, scholarly, film analysis and interpretation, critically, historically and theoretically informed film studies research, and multimedia forms of academic presentation and writing.

By focusing on a single set film [in 2012-13, this is intended to be Los olvidados/The Young and the Damned (Luis Bunuel, Mexico, 1950)], the module will offer the space and guidance to enable you to develop your own critical case study. Weekly lectures will introduce you to the film, its production and reception contexts, as well as to a wide range of potentially relevant issues to consider when establishing how you will go on to work with it. The lectures will also introduce you to a range of film studies skills and methods, including ways of conducting and presenting film research afforded by multimedia technology. In seminars you will analyse the set film, and its possible connections with other films, and explore your ideas and research methods under the close supervision of a tutor, as well as present your work in progress.

The History of the Modern A

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

By combining analysis of scores and social history, on this module you will examine the establishment from the early 19th century to the present day, of counter-cultures that subvert the authority of the 'classical', both within the concert-hall and beyond. You will consider the consequences of modernism's estrangement from the aspirations of the concert-going public, the aesthetic re-alignments prompted by the emergence of a popular mass culture, and the impact of electronic and digital technology.

This 30-credit thick version of the module has an additional weekly seminar in which these issues are examined through close case studies of particular works or phenomena. You will be guided in making a critical response in the form of a creative exercise, which may take the form of a composition or analysis depending on yor individual area of interest.

The Rise of Classical Music A

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

Combining cultural history and analysis of scores, this module examines the establishment of a 'classical' repertoire in concert-hall, opera-house and the home, from the first decades of the 19th century. It will include examination of the authoritative influence exerted by such figures as Bach and Beethoven throughout this period and the varieties of 'neo-classical' response during the 20th century.

This 30-credit version of the module has an additional weekly seminar in which these issues are examined through close case study of particular works/phenomena. You will be guided in making a critical response in the form of an creative exercise which may take the form of a composition or analysis depending on your individual area of interest.

American Cinema B

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

An awareness of how Hollywood cinema was shaped, how it acquired its position of dominance, and the forms and aesthetic conventions that characterise it, is essential to an understanding of cinema more generally. Accordingly, this module will focus on the formation of Hollywood in the 1910s through to the post-World War 2 era, with particular emphasis placed on the development of the 'studio system' and Hollywood's 'golden age' of the 1920s to 1950. You will view a range of representative Hollywood films made during the period and analyse them in relation to the industry and its practices. You will also situate Hollywood cinema within the political and social life of the United States in the period.

Creative Music Technologies 1

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module will introduce the basic skills in working in the electronic music studio and will suggest methods and modes for their creative application and development. In order to integrate it into the general Sussex curriculum, it will be viewed primarily as a composition module using the studio, not an introduction to recording and sound engineering.

Practical tuition in the operation of hardware and software will be paralleled by selective study of electronic musical set works and discussion of the aesthetics of the medium. The practical and technical aspects of the module will always be considered in the context of compositional and aesthetic approaches such as those introduced in the new Introduction to Electronic Music module: musique concrete, elektronische musik, electroacoustic music, computer composition, electronic dance music, electronica, soundscapes and sound installations. As well as looking at basic recording, sequencing, sampling, editing and mixing techniques using Logic Pro, you will engage in sound manipulation and synthesis (eg using Peak and Audiosculpt), investigate the techniques of both analogue and digital synthesis and the creative uses of electronic instruments. An investigation of the formal, temporal and conceptual approaches to electronic, electroacoustic and computer composition will be central to this process.

Creative Music Technologies 2

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module is a continuation of Creative Music Technologies 1 module and will supplement and expand upon the core subjects covered there. The first half of the module will cover studio recording (microphone techniques, multitrack recording and mixing) using recording/sequencing software (such as ProTools) in depth, and there could be further study of the Logic Pro platform and wave editing software such as Peak. The second half of the module will focus on more specialised digital synthesis software platforms (such as Max/MSP, the IRCAM forum software, SuperCollider etc) and their applications such as algorithmic composition, live DSP and sound synthesis.

Culture, Race and Ethnicity

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module explores the relationship between ideas of culture, race and ethnicity both historically and in contemporary society. You will examine a range of empirical examples that demonstrate how the concepts have been used – sometimes separately, sometimes in interlocking ways – in political projects or movements. There will be particular focus on contructions of 'whiteness'. Examples may include the use of race in 19th-century colonial administration, the politics of ethnicity in postwar London or the rise of the new right in contemporary Europe.

Debates in Media Studies B

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module explores some of the most well-known and widely-regarded theoretical and critical approaches used in the study of media today. It also identifies and analyses the debates circulating around those approaches.

In asking 'What is the subject of media?' and 'How should we study it?', different approaches come up with very different answers. Media can be approached as ritual, (global) industry, meaning-maker, technology, dreamworld, everyday life, workplace, or sensual pleasure machine. Focus can switch from media production and organisation to analysis of media output, exploration of consumption and use, and to the bigger issue of media in society.

In carving a way through this complexity the module will introduce a few key frameworks - for example 'political economy', 'critical race studies', 'psychoanalysis', 'feminist media theory' - and alert you to how differences of approach have emerged depending on the specific medium or cultural form (radio, TV, cinema, internet, newspaper, advertising, music etc). However, a repeated reference point for the course is the cultural output of media and methods analysis, especially modes of textual analysis.

Ensemble Performance

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

You prepare with ensemble conductors/coaches, for an ensemble recital at the end of the module. Additionally, performers are asked to prepare course notes for your recital. Throughout the module critical perspectives on good ensemble recital practice are fostered through contribution to, and attendance at, weekly lunchtime recitals and occasional workshops in addition to regular attendance at university. You are examined on your performance practice and programming skills.

Gender, Space and Culture

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

Why is space important to our understanding of communication? How do subjects travel through space in order to construct narratives of identity? How are spaces moralised, sexed and gendered? How do they accrue significance or symbolism?

In the last decade there has been a convergence across many academic disciplines to comprehend spatiality. Social spaces are never empty or static, they are full of the shifting dynamics of power and politics. On this module you will study to what extent gender is articulated in public and private spaces, so that they may be considered to be predominantly feminine, masculine, queer or transgendered. You will also examine how spaces and places are dynamic, unstable and mutable in relation to competing social differences. We will look at a variety of sites of the everyday, from the domestic to the visual, from bodies to landscape and virtual realities using key theoretical concepts such as 'performativity', 'representation' and 'transectionality' to interpret how our culture is thoroughly imbued with gendered and spatialized assumptions.

Topics may include: thinking about gendered journeys such as package holidays or migration; the boundaries and borders of the self; the national and the global; social inclusion and exclusion; and representations of the feminized underclass, or the masculinized professional. We will also consider queer cultural geographies as represented in films; 'freaky bodies' and transexuality online; and the spatial politics of protest on the streets and in the home.

Industry Projects

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module is organised around a live industry project working with partners in the creative sector. The project will normally be a live project with a brief set by the partner/client. The aim is to use the experience from previous placements as an opportunity to develop work of a professional standard in a working environment with real clients.

The module will enable students to further develop their team-working skills as well as their written and verbal communication skills. On this module students will also be required to reflect upon their work experience through an online journal and a reflective statement.

Journalism and Crisis B

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

Global Journalism in Crisis offers a diversity of approaches for studying journalists and journalism around the world. It charts the opportunities, challenges and crises facing journalism in an increasingly global field. The module examines the impact of developments in journalism that have resulted in it becoming an international phenomenon operating in global networks as opposed to within national or cultural borders. It looks at journalism in crisis (as a practice) and journalism as it responds to and communicates crises in the world. It explores the blurring between entertainment and news, as well as the formerly clear division between journalism, public relations and business communication. The module draws on specific examples of global media events to examine these issues and enables students to creatively and critically explore the challenges of consuming and producing globalised stories.

Locating Cinema: British Cinema B

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

Media, Memory, History

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module examines the relationship between history, memory and media. Its starting points are; (i) The media are historical artifacts, forged and developed in historical contexts that they also influence. (ii) Access to history is mediated through various technical and cultural systems e.g. television, print, and networked and mobile media. Media systems capture, store, and re-disseminate material that may be returned to us as collective or individual memories for instance through family photographs, or through the annual collective commemoration of official memorial days. The relationship between history and memory is thus bound up with how media systems become embedded cultures. (iii) New media in particular, produce new kinds of artificial memory and thus may intervene in new ways in the making of history.

The module will address some of the questions arising around media, history and memory through sessions including explorations of prosthetic memory, war memories and memorials, the history of the invention of the media, memory damage and the politics of omission, family histories and migration patterns as photographic record, race and mediated memory, and questions of the convergence of the archive and the network which mean media records of events are simultaneously stored and represented.

Music, Stage and Screen 1: from opera to film

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module is split into two five-week units and will examine the history of musical narrative from classical opera to film music. Its focus will be the audio-visual study of musical 'texts', uncovering the technical means by which music creates metaphors of linear plot and development. The module concentrates on opera and film, although it also considers some more abstract instrumental music, such as the symphonic poem.

The work of Richard Strauss, for example, occupies a space between the language of late romantic opera and 20th century film music, made more explicit in the work of Eric Korngold, whose operas lead directly into his film scores of the 1930s and 1940s.

You will also consider post-war scores in which the role of music is more complex than the mere ghosting of visual action. The 'psychological' music motifs in Hermann's scores for Hitchcock's Psycho and Vertigo are cases in point; these works have operatic links, with the 'irrational' music of Schoenberg's Erwartung and Berg's Lulu. Essays are balanced with regular aural analysis training in opera and film music. No prior technical knowledge of music is needed to study this module, nor an ability to read music; the objects of study are audio-visual, not written scores.

Music, Stage and Screen 2: Film, Musical and Music Theatre

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module examines issues relating to how music is used on stage and screen. The module complements the material studied in the autumn term 'Music, Stage and Screen 1: from opera to film' such that the module is entirely free-standing and MSS1 is not a pre-requisite for MSS2.

The module is divided into two parts exploring European, 'world' and contemporary film music and musicals.

Whereas MSS1 explored how early Hollywood film music (from the silent era through to the Hitchcock films of the 1960s) evolved predominantly from 'narrative' musical models of 19th-and 20th-century opera and symphonic poem, this first part explores alternative and non-narrative solutions developed in examples taken from European, 'world' and contemporary cinema. It examines how the music relates to the visual action and what this conveys about the works' cultural, gender and socio-historical identities.

The second part bridges the gap between stage and screen, exploring the popular musical theatre genre of the musical and film musical. One of the most distinctively American of art forms, developed during the module of the twentieth century from its origins in European operetta, this popular genre brings into sharp focus issues of American national and cultural identity.

Professional Media Practice

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module is organised around a work placement in the creative sector. The placement will normally be arranged by yourself and will usually be approximately 20 hours in duration. The aim is to use the experience as an opportunity to develop and reflect upon your personal and social skills in the work place; the demands of time management; technical, organisational and/or creative achievement as appropriate.

The module will enable you to compile necessary documentation in relation to work, such as a portfolio containing CVs and development plans, as well as help you to assess your skills and perform SWOT analyses and a Key Skills Audit.

On this module you will also be encouraged to reflect upon your work experience through an online journal and a synthesis paper which will draw both on the 'hands on' knowledge gained during the placement and, where appropriate, your academic study.

Solo Performance

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

You prepare with your instrumental teacher, for a recital at the end of the year. Additionally, performers are asked to prepare programme notes for their recital and undertake a repertoire survey for their instrument/voice. Throughout the module critical perspectives on good recital practice are fostered through contribution to, and attendance at, weekly lunchtime recitals and occasional workshops. You are examined on your performance practice and programming skills.

Sound, Culture & Society

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

The Allure of Things

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module explores the circulation of significant objects (material or otherwise) within specific cultural and historical contexts. It analyses the social/cultural/economic relationships which shape and are shaped by the movement of 'things'.  You will gain an understanding of theories of exchange, commoditisation and consumption. These will be set against wider cultural and economic transformations as the result of colonialism, capitalist penetration and globalisation.

Theory Taste and Trash B

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module aims to introduce students to two related issues, namely:
a) a historically-rooted account of how the study of popular culture came to be established in British higher education and of some of the key theoretical approaches that helped to shape those studies
b) an exploration of how the bringing together of popular culture and ‘the academy’ has and continues to pose intriguing problems around hierarchies of taste, questions of value, and definitions of educational worth.

A series of lectures will offer students both a historical overview of those issues and an introduction to the influence of key writers, theorists and approaches, while the module seminars would help students to engage with particularly significant and talismanic texts (from writers such as Hall, Bourdieu and Bakhtin) in the field and also to test out the interpretive frameworks they offer by undertaking some case study analyses of contemporary popular cultural texts and practices (in fields such as television, popular music, the leisure industries and youth culture).

TV: Fictions and Entertainments B

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module focuses on the textual and contextual study of television's key fiction and entertainment genres - soap operas, sitcoms and other styles of comedy, game shows, lifestyle television, daytime television, and music television among others. You will be encouraged to explore the defining generic characteristics of these televisual categories, their representational strategies, their ideological implications, their particular pleasures and their relationship with audiences. The primary focus will be on British television, although material from other broadcasting contexts will be used where appropriate for comparative purposes. Most of the primary material will be drawn from current or recent TV, but students will also be required to investigate the history of popular TV genres to understand their evolution over time.

Advanced Composition and Arrangement

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

Advanced Performance

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

Dissertation: Case Studies

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

Dissertation: Historical and Contextual

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

Film Music and Audiovisual Project

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

Music, Media and Culture

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module explores the relationship between music and media of all kinds, and questions the ideological structures underpinning the consumption of music in western society. The module focuses on the relationship between musical production and media technologies (the microphone, phonograph, radio and film), the changing role and place of music in society - understood through an analysis of media technologies, the meaning and nature of music and media reception in society, and the political economy of the music industry.

Project 1 Autumn

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

Project 2 Spring

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

Studio Project

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

The Musical

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module will examine the musical, tracing the hegemonic Hollywood genre to its roots in European vaudeville, cabaret culture, stage musicals and operas. It will also explore musicals that may seek to defy or respond to Hollywoodcentric, Eurocentric and heterosexist conceptions of genre. The module is divided into two sections. The first section will analyse the Hollywood musical of the studio era, by examining both the stylistic features and historical context of some of its different sub-genres; the show/backstage musical, the fairy tale musical and the folk musical. It may also explore the diverse ways in which the studio era musical as entertainment may work ideologically in relation to issues of race, ethnicity and sexuality.

The second section of the module will focus on the musical as it has developed beyond Hollywood (and beyond the conceptual framework of Hollywood). Topics may include; the subcultural musical, the animated musical (arguably, the most common form of the contemporary musical in both its mainstream (Disney) and counter mainstream forms (South Park)) and may conclude with a consideration of the future of the musical in terms of gender, age and physicality.