Postgraduate Music 2025-2026

This course examines musical repertoire, practices and culture in Scotland from the 18th century through to the present day. Seminars will focus on a series of case studies, together exploring wider questions around identity, tradition and genre, especially the intersections between classical, folk, and popular styles, and the creation of national and regional identities through music.

This course provides students with an opportunity to reflect on and develop their own research practices. Engaging with topics and methods relevant to all six of the MMus study paths (community music, composition, music education, musicology, performance, and sonic arts) the course will encourage students to engage with both novel and well-established approaches to music studies.

This course will explore practices and research from the fields of music, therapy, public health and medicine, to rigorously explore the relationship between music, health and wellbeing.

Students will be supported to undertake a range of self-directed research-based activities to develop a community music-based intervention in an area of their own interest.

This course examines popular music’s relationship with and to culture and society. Explored through the lens of cultural studies, this course examines key developments since the 1950s as they relate to contemporary music genres, subcultures, and wider socio-cultural issues and movements.

This course enables students to be creative in developing their own independent and individual ideas through an extended research project in musicology and/or composition and/or performance resulting in a substantial piece of original work. They will acquire a range of skills, techniques and understanding enabling them to become effective researchers. The project outcome will be a dissertation and/or portfolio of compositions and/or a performance recital demonstrating original research. The exact nature of the project is the result of negotiation between supervisor (or supervisory team) and student, subject to the approval of the programme coordinator. 

This course provides students with an applied understanding of research communication skills relevant to all six study paths (community music, composition, music education, musicology, performance, and sonic arts).  Students will engage directly with current issues in music research, experiencing and critiquing different methods of written, recorded, and oral communication. The course is structured around the departmental Music Research Seminars, but students are also expected to attend other seminar and/or events relevant to their own research practice.

This course enables students to be creative in developing their own independent and individual ideas through an extended research project in any one, or a combination of, the six MMus study paths (community music, composition, music education, musicology, performance, and sonic arts). Students will acquire a range of skills, techniques and understanding enabling them to become effective researchers in their chosen area(s). The exact nature of the project is the result of negotiation between supervisor (or supervisory team) and student, subject to the approval of the programme coordinator.  

This course is designed for master’s level composers to encounter key repertoire of contemporary music and relate new ideas to their own practice. The works studied will largely be from the Western classical tradition, but students will also have the opportunity to explore different and hybrid genres to obtain a fuller picture of today’s music making. Students will be required to regularly critique existing works as part of their formative assessment. The summative assessment will require students to show how they have assimilated new ideas and worked them into their own music.