Courses
- BA Music
Average intake at Queen’s: 4
The Course
The three-year Music course offers wide-ranging coverage of music in its historical and cultural contexts, study of musical genres, forms and styles, compositional techniques, and performance, and allows increasing specialisation in one or more areas as students proceed through the course. Combined with the extremely rich opportunities for performance in the College and the University, the course helps every student to graduate as a mature and well-rounded musician with an informed and lively sense of the study and practice of the subject.
There are excellent facilities in College for practical music. These include the award-winning Shulman Auditorium (completed in 2012) with Steinway grand piano, two Music Practice Rooms (both with pianos and harpsichords), and a grand piano, two-manual harpsichord, and chamber organ (by Robin Jennings, 2024) in chapel. The main chapel organ, by Frobenius (1965), is internationally esteemed and used for weekly recitals during full term. Music students are provided with an electric piano in their room.
The College offers Choral Scholarships each year, as well as Organ Scholarships and Instrumental Awards.
Teaching
The number of academic staff in music at Queen’s, and the diversity of their academic interests, means that many parts of the course are taught within the College. Queen’s is also committed to securing specialist teaching in other colleges for its students as appropriate.
The first year of the course provides a solid foundation in musical skills, and helps you to develop new ways of thinking about music, in terms of cultural and historical contexts, analysis, and techniques of composition. Students also choose two out of six elements from: performance, composition, extended essay, musical skills (including conducting and arranging), ethnomusicology, and historically informed performance. During the second and third years of the course broad study of music history, analysis, and musical scholarship and culture is combined with a huge choice of options, including project work (such as a dissertation), performance, composition, ethnomusicology, and specialist study of subjects (from early music to aspects of contemporary musical culture) reflecting the research expertise of Faculty staff. Performance-related options include courses in chamber-music performance, choral conducting, choral performance, community music and education, and recording and producing music.
Admissions
Queen’s has a strong tradition in both academic and practical music (both choral and instrumental), and achieves very strong academic results in this subject. The College normally admits four undergraduate students to read Music each year, making it one of the larger colleges for this subject in terms of academic places. Please see more information on the application process here.
