Aims

• to encourage creativity and imaginative engagement with contemporary discourses and contexts, foregrounding the commercial dimension inherent in all pop music.
• to develop individual abilities in recording, non-notated performance and/or arranging/mixing
• to prepare students for specialist

Outline Of Syllabus

Throughout both semesters, lectures alternate week by week with seminars, tutorial and crit groups. Lecture content will be concerned with developing knowledge of contemporary repertoire, but moreover learning how to negotiate a dialogic pathway through the myriad aesthetic frameworks manifest in the contemporary context. Students are encouraged from the outset to see their personal involvement in the module as the development of a creative musical profile through which to develop a distinctive response to ongoing discourses in contemporary popular music; a short essay assignment for submission at the end of semester one will expressly assess the student’s engagement with, and reflection on, such discourses - the idea of ‘Commercial Recording As Critical Practice’ is conceived to bring the disciplines of written/spoken critical reflection and music making closer together.

Teaching Rationale And Relationship

Lectures introduce students to ways of negotiating the vast, multi-layered repertoire of contemporary (meaning present-day) music through critical and historical perspectives that, at the same time, place their own creative expression at the heart of how they respond. Lectures also analyse ways in which the post-digital networking environment offers myriad, imaginative ways in which musicians can get their work heard. From the outset, students are encouraged to think of themselves as ‘practising (real-life) artists’ – the music they produce for their final submission must be seen to represent an aesthetic, discursive position in relation to everything else in the modern context. Practical work, artist crit groups and tutorials help students realise their ideas in a manner that explores aesthetic parameters and technological avenues with the help of teaching staff, but predominantly independently.

Assessment Rationale And Relationship

Students are assessed on the degree of success and effectiveness with which they were able to formulate a vision for distinctive, new work and realise it. Presenting their work publicly as much as possible throughout the module (via online networking platforms and/or at public live events) will be crucial in helping students bypass the concern for marking criteria per se and produce work that does what it’s trying to do: the outcome should be ‘good’ music. However, the marking criteria will be foregrounded from the start – relating them to a professional rationale will form a significant part of group discussion from early on in the module.