Newcastle University

MA in Music: Pathway in Theoretical and Cultural Musicology

ICMuS has a unique focus in both its teaching and its research on ‘critical’ and ‘radicalising’ developments within the discipline of musicology (click here for staff research interests in musicology). There is strong agreement among scholars here that musicology needs constant renewal from outside itself, hence the strong interdisciplinary emphasis in our research and teaching in musicology (click here form more on this). Staff at ICMuS have specialisms in recent cultural theories of music (psychoanalysis, political theory and philosophy, recent developments in continental philosophy, gender studies, gay lesbian and bisexual studies, studies in transsexuality, listening ecologies and so on), music analysis and historical musicology (early music to circa 1700, nineteenth- and twentieth-century music).

Staff at ICMuS are uniquely placed to deliver this rich and challenging programme, with experienced teachers and researchers delivering the curriculum. The programme is designed to help you develop a firm and critical grasp of disciplinary developments since the so-called 'new musicology' and to develop your own voice in relation to those developments. You will be introduced to a range of theoretical models for the study of music, and will be taught how to think your way through some of the more contested fields of study, and how to develop your writing in response to those fields. A particular emphasis is placed in this programme on understanding the political, ideological and epistemological underpinnings of the discipline. If you are not interested in questioning the basis for your own ideas of the world and how music works in it, then this programme is definitely not for you. If, conversely, you are interested in thinking about how music can engage in political work, how thinking about that work can transform our understanding of music's political potential and how our assumptions about the meanings and uses of music shape our world, then this programme is for you.

In this pathway, you take the usual research training and dissertation (see below) and you also choose from modules that deal specifically with recent methodological and theoretical developments in the field.

Modules on this pathway

• The core module for this pathway is Debates in the Philosophy and Theory of Music in which you look at recent developments and debates in the discipline and learn to question and critique the terms on which the discipline continues to operate
• Elective modules on this pathway include Music Historiography, Advanced Music Analysis, Studying Popular Music, Advanced Studies in Ethnomusicology
• You can also choose from final-year advanced undergraduate modules (recent modules have included: The Idea of Beethoven; Music Gender and Sexuality, Music about Aids, Parody in Music, European High Modernisms)
• Your dissertation will be on a topic related to recent debates in the discipline, or will approach a political, repertorial or methodological question from a ‘critical’ or ‘radicalising’ perspective

Some facts about the teaching of theoretical and cultural musicologies at ICMuS

• As part of its ongoing commitment to the ‘democratisation of the possible’ within the discipline, ICMuS hosts the online journal Radical Musicology
• Our research profile is squarely committed to testing the boundaries of our discipline (see here and here for more)
• We host an international seminar series at which specialists from all over the UK and beyond visit ICMuS and talk about their work
• In recent years, both Lawrence Kramer and Phil Bohlman have been visiting professors at ICMuS

Staff teaching and researching in this area

• Paul Attinello (Modernist and Postmodernist music and theory, especially since World War II, music and gender) click here for more
• Ian Biddle (music & politics; gender & sexuality; psychoanalysis; popular musics) click here for more
• David Clarke (Michael Tippett; analysis & theory; music & culture) click here for more
• Nanette De Jong (ethnomusicology; the African diaspora; Salsa; memory; performance) click here for more
• Richard Elliott (loss, memory, nostalgia and revolution in popular music) click here for more
• Paul Fleet (20th-century music; music analysis) click here for more
• Kirsten Gibson (early modern English secular song; print culture; gender; historiography and critical theory) click here for more
• Bennett Hogg (composition, ethnomusicology, cultural history and theory of technology, psychoanalysis) click here for more
• Bethany Lowe (early 20th-century music, music theory and analysis, performance analysis) click here for more
• Goffredo Plastino (ethnomusicology; world music/world beat; traditional & popular musics, especially of the Mediterranean) click here for more