MA in Creative & Cultural Entrepreneurship: Music Pathway

The programme contains four taught modules and a further dissertation/portfolio component.

Music Pathway students choose an option offered by the Music Department for module II. Attendance is mandatory for all taught sections of the programme. To encourage collaborative learning we try to teach all students together wherever possible, irrespective of their particular pathway.

Theories of Capital critically examines key theories of social, economic, cultural and symbolic capital.

The module details these conceptual capital frameworks and compliments this theoretical foundation with application in the creative and cultural industries with a focus on government policy and the unique economic characteristics of the creative industries. For example consumer consumption of status goods will be assessed using theories of symbolic and social capital.

Emphasis will be given on the role of intellectual capital in policy. Students will learn the analytical rigour to critically assess creative and cultural industry policy and market structures. Students will be able to translate theory into practice, and practice into theory.

Please visit the following links, depending on your course of study, to see respective options for this module. Please note all options are subject to change depending on availability and modules taught.

• Computing
• Design
• Media and Communications
• Music
• Theatre and Performance
30 credits. Module III: Entrepreneurial Modelling Module III: Entrepreneurial Modelling 30 credits

This module aims to nurture your skills and attitudes to allow you to become an innovator and to provide models of entrepreneurial/business support relevant and useful for creative entrepreneurs. This module will provide a link between the theoretical aspects of the broader overview of the sector and the practice specifics, and work to focus on how creativity can be strengthened when put through creative commercialisation modelling techniques. The module has evolved from NESTA’s Creative Pioneer Programme and will use the Modelling Techniques that were designed and have evolved from `The Academy’ and `Insight Out’ which provide approaches to commercialising creativity.

It will critically review the key characteristics of successful enterprises, entrepreneurs and leaders, within the cultural and more commercially focussed creative industries. It will look at the range of business models that exist and review how best to build a financially sustainable organisation. The key areas of modelling techniques covered are:

• Relationship Modelling – this will assist you to understand the range of business models in the creative industries, and to create the most appropriate route to market; it will consider the relationship that the originator of the creative idea has to the production, distribution and the audience/customer/client; it uncovers your relationship to “reward”.
• Evidence Modelling – this model uses Marshall McLuhan’s Tetrad Model to review the likely impact of the idea; it helps make the enterprise tangible and to ensure that the entrepreneur remains in control of the effects of their ideas. Using the modelling technique helps you to articulate your values and the benefits of your ideas.
• Blueprint Modelling – an approach to creating an operating plan, which will move your idea to market, articulating all of the activities and responsibilities required.
• Consequence Modelling – using all of the knowledge from the modelling techniques, this will uncover the financial consequences of the decisions made. It will introduce you to basic financial modelling concepts, and ensure they are comfortable with the financial language of creative entrepreneurs.
30 credits.

Module IV: Entrepreneurial Practices and Modes of Production

Either: Sector Overiew: Performing Arts and Audience Development and Fundraising 30 Credits

OR Audience Development and Fundraising Work Placement 30 Credits

Module V: Dissertation or project/portfolio

EITHER: Dissertation or Project/Portfolio

The content and research imperatives of the dissertation/portfolio can be developed in tutorials with staff to address your individual needs. It could range from an entirely written document researching a particular area of the cultural and creative industries to a fully developed proposal for a new business.

Module II: Creative Practice Module title Credits. Contemporary Ethnomusicology Contemporary Ethnomusicology 30 credits

This explores contemporary approaches in ethnomusicology. The focus is on contemporary theoretical issues in the field, although current concerns will be situated within the history of ethnomusicological discourse. The module will address a range of topics and issues, such as globalisation and diasporas, the “world music” phenomenon, ethics, urban ethnomusicology, cognitive approaches, musical experience and phenomenology, music technology, and issues of gender, sexuality, and ‘race’. During the module, you will gain familiarity with the connections between ethnomusicology and related disciplines such as anthropology, and with debates concerning disciplinary boundaries within music studies.

This module does not require prior knowledge of ethnomusicology.

Coordinator: Dr. Barley Norton

30 credits. Critical Musicology and Popular Music Critical Musicology and Popular Music 30 credits

This module will provide historical context by tracing the way in which popular music has posed problems for and also made a significant contributions to the development of musicology as a discipline. It will introduce students to key debates and issues, conceptual terms and methodological approaches and highlight the various intellectual legacies that feed into the study of popular music (such as the ‘discovery’, valorisation and study of the ‘folk’ and folk song; and the ‘critical theory’ of Adorno and the Frankfurt School seen as a response to commodification, the introduction of recorded sound and anxiety about ‘mass culture’; the cultural politics associated with the ‘counter-culture’ and ‘new social movements’). The module will highlight how the development of scholarly debates about popular music has been informed by interdisciplinary dialogues, an embracement of ‘the popular’ as a political project and the gradual institutionalization of popular music studies within the academy.

To take this module you should have: Prerequisite skills: a general awareness of theoretical debates about popular music; a familiarity with various styles of popular music and musicians; an ability to write in a critical and analytical manner.

Coordinator: Professor Keith Negus

30 credits. Material, Form and Structure Material, Form and Structure 30 credits

This module is divided into two parts. The first concentrates on orchestration and contemporary developments in instrumental techniques, and the second considers the nature of material in relation to the articulation of formal structures.

Taking Schoenberg's comments concerning the organisation of timbre from the end of his ‘Harmonielehre’ (1911) as a starting point, the module explores the more recent investigations into the relationship between harmony, texture and form. Areas also to be discussed will include stochastic music, spectral composition, sound realism, microtonality, arborescences and complexity. The notion of ‘material’ in relation to orchestration and notation will be studied. The module is designed to develop further an understanding of instrumental usage. Consideration of both standard and extended playing techniques of individual instruments will be included, with particular reference to those instruments encountered less often.

Guidance will be given on how to develop an original and individual approach to instrumental colour and function. Issues related to writing for the voice will also be addressed. The module will also study issues raised by the musical notations employed by composers since c. 1950 and by improvisers in different fields who have (more or less) rejected Western musical notation as a tool. The module provides opportunity for composers to experiment and engage with different types of notation in a practical setting.

To take this module you should have: the ability to read advanced notation and scores, including a basic knowledge of standard orchestral instruments and playing techniques; some knowledge of recent developments in contemporary ‘classical’ music and familiarity with the developments of 20th Century compositional thought from Webern to Boulez, Stockhausen, Ligeti, etc.

Convenor: Roger Redgate

30 credits. New Directions in Popular Music Research New Directions in Popular Music Research 30 credits

This module provides a critical appraisal of the philosophical, conceptual and methodological limitations of existing approaches to researching popular music, whilst exploring ways of overcoming these and finding new research directions. The module surveys a cross section of studies that have been conducted in different contexts, with varied methodologies informed by contrasting agendas: This includes scholarship focussing separately on industries and production, texts and meaning, reception and consumption and scientific research on music. You think across disciplinary boundaries, informed by an oft-repeated maxim; that innovative and significant research entails the art of asking the right questions. Hence, you ask new questions of old research, and set up new questions for potential future research. The module will complement musicological techniques by drawing from methods deployed across the arts and humanities, business and the sciences when exploring methodological techniques for researching such questions.

30 credits. Philosophies of Music Philosophies of Music 30 credits

Everyone has philosophical ideas about music. They tend to come to the fore when we want to dismiss certain works as ‘noise’ (the ‘definition’ problem), or bypass historical context by claiming an interest in ‘the music itself’ (the ‘ontological’ problem), or assert a belief in the profundity of music, or the embodiment of emotions in music, or the parallels between music and language (these are semantic and epistemological problems). They arise too when we defend ourselves by saying that all values are relative (except, apparently, that one, which is supposed to be a universal truth), and that non-western cultures and subcultures have every right to make a claim on the notions of art and the aesthetic.

And philosophical issues also lie at the heart of the ethical decisions that arts administrators and politicians have to make about the distribution of funds in a world of scarce resources – should we allow ourselves to weep at Tosca whilst ignoring tragedy in the streets?

This module provides a gathering-point for discussion and examination of the many concepts that play a role in the ways in which we define, understand, evaluate and justify music. Its aim is to say things so clearly that we can tell when we are talking nonsense, and it does this by analysing ideas systematically in relation to the writings of important figures in the field (see the bibliography on learn.gold).

To take this module you should have: some knowledge of the traditions of music (whether classical or popular or non-western), a good standard of linguistic literacy, and a willingness to challenge your own ideas as well as those of others.

Coordinator: Anthony Pryer

30 credits. Popular Music: Listening, Analysis and Interpretation Popular Music: Listening, Analysis and Interpretation 30 credits

This module explores ways in which analytical listening and writing can – and perhaps can’t – help us to understand individual and generic working methods within, and to locate and construct ‘meaning’ for, popular music. Key topics that will be covered include: the problems of the popular music ‘text’, and of the analytical methods that might be used to access it; the representation of popular music in writing, notation and visual image; the use of close listening and analysis in the investigation of individual, cultural and historical musical subjects (in both senses of that term); the variety of ‘analytical’ popular musical knowledge as it appears in scholarly, journalistic and audience discourses.

To take this module you should have: a working knowledge of basic music theory and terminology; familiarity with various styles of popular music; an ability to research and to write in a critical manner. Prior knowledge of art music analytical systems (Schenker, Riemann, etc.) is neither assumed nor necessary.

Convenor: Dr. Tom Perchard

30 credits. Sound Agendas Sound Agendas 30 credits

Through lectures, discussions and tutorials – including reference to core theoretical concepts in sonic art as well as current thinking concerning studio-based composition and artistic practices using sound – the module develops a theoretical framework for practice. Pivotal historical developments in the application of audio technologies in sonic art are presented, placing compositional techniques in their wider context. The issues and genres considered include: theoretical underpinnings of musique concrète, elektronische musik, futurism and fluxus; interactivity and live electronics; silence and noise; post-digital aesthetics; sampling and plunderphonics; utterance and text-sound composition; audiovision; acoustics and architecture; perception and interpretation; acoustic ecology and phonography. The factors that gave rise to these issues and genres and the artistic results are considered. This understanding provides a basis for experiment and critical evaluation through creative work and subsequent theoretical investigation.

Convenor: Dr. John Drever

30 credits. Sources and Resources in the Digital Age Sources and Resources in the Digital Age 30 credits

In the twenty-first century, scholars and performers of music no longer have to rely on published scores, but can work directly from digitized originals or create their own editions.

This module delivers the expertise to do both, and illuminates the processes, both historical and contemporary, through which scores are prepared. Students are trained to work with scholarly resources and all manner of music sources, from manuscripts to digitized autographs to early recordings. Skills are absorbed in lectures and workshops that explore different editorial methods, and the rationales and biases that undergird them. Private tours to London collections, and seminars on cutting-edge editorial projects, complement lectures and workshops. Students learn to command specialist terminology, to assess an edition’s quality, and to use and critique sources of all kinds.

30 credits. Soviet and Post-Soviet Music and Politics Soviet and Post-Soviet Music and Politics 30 credits

The module is designed for students with strong research interest in Russian culture and Russian history. The emphasis is on history, and on different aspects of social and political life in Russia and Eastern Europe, particularly on current issues. Much of the module will be devoted specifically to the Soviet period, to the ‘socialist realism’ rules in creative arts. Special lectures/seminars will be devoted to Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Schnittke and post-Soviet composers, in relation to the ‘official’ propaganda in Soviet Union, Stalin decrees and the official line of the Communist Party cultural ‘programme’. Particular attention will be given to the current issues, and the development of Russian music after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Students will be given the opportunity to work at Goldsmiths’ unique archives – Prokofiev, Schnittke archives, Stravinsky Collection, and the special collection of post-Soviet scores and documents.

To take this module you should have: competence in academic writing, with a particular focus on the issues of culture and politics. Experience in musical score reading would be helpful, but isn’t compulsory for this module..

30 credits. Strategies for Performance Strategies for Performance 30 credits

What do we perform and how do we perform it effectively and engagingly?

Apart from developing a solid instrumental or vocal technique and applying ‘good musical instincts’, how do we go further and make reasoned and ultimately convincing choices in performance based on a composer’s instructions? What do we need to perform a musical work other than thorough knowledge of the score and ‘musical ability’?

This module seeks to answer such questions through student performance seminars, analytical discussions of musical works, and lectures that draw on critical writings and recordings to illustrate various approaches to classical performance.

30 credits. Working with Original Musical Documents Working with Original Musical Documents 30 credits

The module will provide detailed study of selected manuscript and printed sources, with a guide to their notational systems, palaeographic features, their relation to other copies of the same repertory (stemmatics) and