Creative Music Practice

Entry requirements

A UK 2:1 honours degree or its international equivalent.

You must submit a portfolio as part of your application. Your portfolio should contain either three pieces of composition or examples of work related to your proposed field of study.

Months of entry

January, September

Course content

The PhD in Creative Music Practice is an opportunity for you to pursue practice-led research in the field of music at the highest level. This will involve research that combines textual and musical outputs. For example, composition, performance (either of original or pre-existing repertoire), installation, sound design, and interactive music software.

The outputs take the form of a portfolio, performance or recording, as well as theoretical work and documentation of the processes by which the music was made (video, photographs, recordings, sketches, studies, web pages, etc). The musical outputs are explicitly linked to the textual material. This link may take various forms: musical material might exemplify, contextualise or expand an idea elaborated in the text, and vice versa. The programme requires candidates to critically evaluate and articulate the relationship of textual to extra-textual media in the formation of musical knowledge.

The format of the PhD thesis consists of a text of not more than 50,000 words, as well as the documentation of the process, contained in a coherent and archivable format (bound thesis plus electronic documents (PDF, webpages, etc.) submitted in memory stick/CD/DVD). Where a thesis relates to live musical performances, documentation in the form of high-quality audio and video recordings is central to the submitted materials.

Typical applicants to this programme include:

• composer-theorists who wish to carry out research into and practice of particular compositional models
• performers who wish to deepen their practice through musicological research
• computer music composers who wish to develop documented hardware/software systems for their music
• performers with a need to study the techniques and organology of period instruments
• instrument builders/researchers seeking historical techniques found in evidence from the original instruments