Undergraduate Programmes in Music
The International Centre for Music Studies (ICMuS) offers four undergraduate degrees:
- the BA in Music
- the BMus with a Year Abroad
- the BMus in Folk and Traditional Music
- the BA in Contemporary and Popular Music
Each of our undergraduate degrees offers a mix of practical and academic work, and you will have ever more freedom to determine the nature of that mix as you proceed through your course.
The four degrees are designed to stimulate the development of thoughtful, well-informed musicians possessing a wide range of musical experience. In our teaching, we aim to promote in you a critical understanding of and engagement with a diversity of musical repertories.
Throughout your time in ICMuS you will be introduced not only to the essentials of a sound musical and academic training, encompassing approaches that are historical, cultural, theoretical, practical, technical and creative, but you will also develop an awareness both of traditional areas of study and of recent and current developments in musical thinking and intellectual inquiry.
We try to offer as much choice and flexibility as possible within our coherent programme frameworks to enable you to pursue your own interests and meet your particular needs. This might include, for example, the laying of a solid foundation for postgraduate study and research or developing transferable skills valuable in themselves and of value to future employers. For us, this means not only training students to act professionally in all aspects of their work, addressing the needs of, for example, concert promoters, club and festival organizers, record companies and so on, but enabling students to think flexibly and to respond creatively to the challenges of the work environment they will enter after leaving university.
We want to produce graduates who have a good foundation on which to build careers in a variety of areas of the academy, music practice, the music industry, the cultural sector, arts administration, education and in employment generally.
ICMuS has recently been the lead partner in the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL): Music and Inclusivity (2005-2010). This was a £5 million consortium project, funded by Hefce (Higher Education Funding Council of England) and had five other university members from across the North East of England. The CETL comprised twelve innovative curriculum development projects all of which address inclusivity by both broadening music education to encompass students of diverse backgrounds and promoting all musical practices that stake a claim to a place in contemporary culture - classical, popular, folk and traditional, brass band, new or avant-garde, and world musics. The legacy of the CETL will directly benefit you if you choose to study at ICMuS - in terms of enhanced facilities, curriculum development and a range of new provision across the undergraduate courses. Click here to read more.