MA Composition provides a space to explore a wider range of approaches and to experiment with new ideas. We’ll support developments in your creative practice through practical consideration of both your professional and academic skills.

In a typical week, you'll have an individual tutorial session with a specialist composition tutor, participate in led group discussion seminars, and attend guest talks from internationally-renowned composers and artists. Workshops with both internal and external ensembles are also held throughout the year.

Your individual tutorials give you personalised contact time with staff composers, who are themselves active composers on the international new music scene. Here, you'll have focused time to discuss and develop your own niche interests and technical concerns, as well as experiment and provoke yourself into exploring new directions in your work.

Weekly discussion seminars allow your personal development to be contextualised amid the work of others, both that of your student colleagues and the wider musical world. Through this you'll develop and expand your creative, technical and academic skills, commenting critically upon your own and others’ work. We set this against a wider consideration of current music and developments in contemporary musical thought by looking at new work.

Through our weekly Creative Sound Forum, we bring in a broad selection of visiting composers to talk about their practice and widen your perspective of ways to make work. Recent visitors at the forum have included internationally-recognised composer Liza Lim, award-winning sound-artist Kathy Hinde, and Mercury-prize nominated artist Anna Meredith.

As well as developing your artistically and musically, the MA Composition course equips you with a broad range of intellectual, practical and transferable skills for the wider workplace. We’ll help you prepare for a portfolio career built around your creative practice, drawing in other related areas of work. The course aims primarily to develop your practice as a composer, as well as supporting the application of these skills in related areas such as teaching, editing, performing, and other areas of the creative industries. Our aim is that when you graduate from the Composition degree, you'll have developed core problem-solving, analytical, and critical skills to support you in the ever-evolving music and composition landscape.