MA in Music

The MA Music advances your exploration of today’s music in all its complexity. From a range of stimulating pathways, you choose one that best suits your interests. Modules are shared across pathways and are rooted in academic and practice-based research.

The MA Music delivers core skills for academic research into music. Providing a uniquely creative approach to graduate studies, the degree accommodates diverse interests and approaches.

The programme and pathways available are:

• MA Music (General)
• Musicology (Pathway A)
• Contemporary Music Studies (Pathway B)
• Ethnomusicology (Pathway C)
• Popular Music Research (Pathway D)

What you'll study

Overview

Each Masters degree is awarded after the accumulation of 180 credits. You take:

• Core module(s) (30 credits each)
• Optional modules (30 credits each)
• Dissertation or Major Project (60 credits)

The topic of your dissertation or project relates closely to the programme outcomes of your pathway and its core modules and is agreed with your pathway leader.

The options provide you with a choice of modules relevant to your chosen pathway. We will offer advice at interview and/or enrolment about your options. Please note that the availability of options may depend upon the department timetable.

Please note that due to staff research commitments not all of these modules may be available every year.

Goldsmiths is ranked 42nd in the world for Performing Arts (QS World University Subject Rankings 2021).

The MA Music equips graduates to take up careers in music such as journalism, teaching, broadcasting, librarianship, historically informed performance, contemporary composition, and arts administration. The programme’s modules explore music as an evolving subject, covering repertories from Western art music through to electronic, popular, audio-visual, non-Western, and contemporary repertoires.

• You develop systematic, critical and creative approaches, exploring musical practice, discourses, and contexts.
• You develop an independent and original approach to current questions and debates.
• You explore interrelationships between music and other subjects, between theory and practice, and between performance and structural interpretation.

The MA Music is an academic rather than a practice-based degree. If you're keen to study composition or performance, please explore our MMus programme and its pathways.

Careers

The programme is designed with careful consideration of the opportunities, challenges and intellectual demands presented by careers in music, such as:

• journalism
• teaching
• broadcasting
• librarianship
• historically-informed performance
• contemporary composition
• arts administration