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Welcome

Context​

‘A real musician’s development cannot be neatly parcelled up into well-defined stages – the process is an individual one, with particular skills and musical insights achieved at different times and through different means for each person.’ – Polifonia 2015:29

As this quotation from ‘Perspectives on 2nd Cycle Programmes In Higher Music Education’ reminds us, the division of Higher Music Education into Undergraduate, Masters and Doctorate is to a certain extent artificial. Nevertheless, there are characteristics of Masters study that are distinctive. Your previous studies and experience have given you a secure foundation in the knowledge and skills needed to pursue a career in music. As a postgraduate student, you now have the opportunity to explore and refine a distinctive artistic personality that will allow you to really make a difference in the fields in which you choose to work.

As well as continuing to develop technical and expressive mastery in your particular discipline, the Conservatoire’s MMus/MA programme demands that you consolidate a well-informed critical attitude not only to your work as a musician but to the process of learning itself, and the place of your arts practice in the wider society. We capture this critical and reflective attitude in the phrase ‘critical artistry’ – the unending process whereby the relative values of particular artistic conceptions, insights and skills are renegotiated and repositioned in the light of new experiences and understandings.

The notion of ‘critical artistry’ also embodies an important epistemological point. As a performing arts institution, we take the view that knowledge is produced and consumed in-and-through performance as well in academic writing. This particular research attitude encourages you to document and reflect upon your performance practice, as a stepping stone either to the profession or to further study at doctoral level.

Your responsibilities as a student​

Given the wide range of both creative and performing disciplines addressed, we have designed a great deal of flexibility into the MMus/MA programme. Within each of the twelve strands of the programme there are a range of choices in teaching, learning and assessment that will allow you to tailor your studies to your own needs. Taken together with the inherently autonomous nature of masters study, this implies a great deal of responsibility on your part for constructing and managing your own learning.

We also expect you to contribute actively and generously to the ecology of the Conservatoire: to both support and be supported by your peers. Your responsibility radiates out from your own individual practice to your colleagues within your department, school, the institution as a whole, and the wider world. As a postgraduate student, you will be challenged to preserve and consolidate your autonomy alongside collaborative relationships with multiple networks:

  • The intra-disciplinary: engagement with others working in the same discipline
  • The inter-disciplinary: engagement with others working in other disciplines
  • The historical: interrogation of past theories and practices which inform current work
  • The transactional: engagement with a wider population which acts as spectator, learner, co-participant or constructive challenger
  • The professional: engagement with professional partners and environments, including the capacity to be agents of change
  • The cultural: engagement with diverse communities of practice
  • The ecological: engagement with the environment, and others in it
  • The digital: engagement with the technological, and virtual, environments

Further information on your responsibilities as a student may be found in the Conservatoire’s Regulations, Codes of Procedure and General Rules, which should be read in conjunction with this Handbook.