Second year - Core modules - Music


This module introduces basic analytical concepts and skills for the understanding of Western art music from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century. Topics may include mode, word-painting, fugue, the schemata of the gallant style, cadence and themes in the Classical style and thereafter, sonata form, the Romantic fragment, Wagner’s form and harmony, narrative patterns, pitch-class collections and sets, non-Germanic musical syntax, twelve-note technique, analysis of rhythm, texture and gesture.

Critical Musicology

This module introduces basic critical methodologies, concepts and vocabularies employed in current academic work in the fields of historical musicology, ethnomusicology and popular music studies. Topics may include the history of musicology, music and culture, contrasting approaches to the anthropology of music, the sociology of music, music and postcolonial theory, music and critical theory, sound studies, the ontology of music, musical modernism and postmodernism, music and politics, music and class, music and ideology, music and violence, the ethics of sound recording, critical organology, music and race, music and feminism, music and gender, music and queer theory, theories of performance, and theories of reception.



