• This course focuses upon composition of contemporary music and offers two distinct pathways.
  • Students can choose to specialise in instrumental composition, in which they will explore a broad range of compositional approaches and techniques with a strong emphasis on inquiry-led practice.
  • This will include collaboration with professional performers and peers, resulting in numerous live premieres of work, and/or the scope for interacting across disciplines.
  • They may also have the opportunity to make mixed-media work, and collaborate with artists working with other media (visual, design, text).
  • Alternatively, they may specialise in electronic/electroacoustic composition, in which they can explore creative applications of analogue/digital technologies, studio-based composition techniques, real-time audio processing techniques, aesthetics of sonic art, historical developments in electronic music, temporal/spatial-audio and post-digital aesthetics, amongst others.
  • At the start of the course, they will be offered intensive training in the knowledge and methods of their chosen field; this is followed by opportunities for independent research and exploration.
  • By the end of the course they will have developed and refined their own compositional voice and will be able to situate creative work within a broader contextual framework.
  • The MA also includes composition for film and film sound recording, recognising training needs for those wishing to enter the creative industries as composers, sound designers and game contributors.