Information for Prospective Research Students

About postgraduate research in the Music Department

You would be joining a lively postgraduate community of about fifty students. As a research student you would initially be registered for our MMus in Composition or MLitt in Musicology; in the second year of full-time study or the fourth year of part-time study, you have the option of upgrading to a PhD. The degree of MPhil is also available for musicologists and composers as an alternative to our taught MA programmes.

If you register with us as a research student, you will be encouraged to attend whichever units or parts of units on our programmes offer you the research training you need, whether as a composer or musicologist. This can include music theory if you do not have a first degree in music, though needs and interests will be assessed individually. The Graduate School, established in 2009, runs a superb series of research training courses, including training in using archives, ethical practice in research, language training, academic writing, and so on.

We shall offer you opportunities to present your work in our research seminars, to meet invited seminar speakers (and even to suggest speakers you would like to hear), to participate in conferences, either as an organiser or speaker, and to publish your research. The Music Department regularly organises major international conferences ('The Travelling Virtuoso in the long Nineteenth Century' and 'Twentieth-century Music and Politics' in 2010) and has a lively concert series. The University's Symphony Orchestra is one of the very best in the UK, and postgraduates who play orchestral instruments are able to audition. We have weekly research seminars in the Department, with a mixture of external, staff and student speakers, and our internationally-recognised Centre for the History of Music in Britain, the Empire and Commonwealth (CHOMBEC) hosts a broad range of events and projects of direct interest to those working on British Music of all varieties and periods.

Staff specialisms in musicology are diverse but our main fields of research are: English and British music, including musicals, film music and the English renaissance (Stephen Banfield, Guido Heldt and John Pickard); Russian and Soviet music (Pauline Fairclough); early medieval music, and particularly western liturgical chant (Emma Hornby).  Current postgraduate research embraces Soviet religious music, British composers and communism, music for Brazilian cinema, music for video games, British opera, Savoy opera, Lennox Berkeley, Robert Pearsall, Ivor Gurney, Elgar, and Anglican monastic liturgies. We have an expanding group of electro-acoustic composition students under Neal Farwell which complements the longer-established Bristol training ground for acoustic composers, currently led by John Pickard.

For more information on the research profile of our academic staff, take a look at Research in the Department of Music. If you are interested in composition, please also take a look at Composition in the Department of Music.

The links on this page will lead you to the University's online prospectus for postgraduates, our list of research programmes and information on application and funding. For an in-depth look at life as a postgraduate in this department, you may wish to look at the section of our website for current students.