This course is designed to enable you to pursue musicology at an advanced level of scholarship, with increased intellectual confidence, enhanced research skills, professional responsibility, and critical and theoretical awareness of sub-disciplines of musicology, appropriate to making an original contribution to the professional field of music studies. You will do so as part of a vibrant, stimulating and energetic community for music researchers at the University of Huddersfield.

We will provide you with a high-quality learning experience, based upon the teaching and research strengths of our staff. We will support you as you develop as a music scholar, learning to understand and evaluate a range of research methods and topics, and how to communicate these both within and outside of the wider academic community. Teaching will include archive-based sessions, which will give you confidence in handling and analysing a wide range of specialist sources from manuscripts to early sound recordings.

You will learn how to devise, research, manage and conduct a major independent study to completion, offering you expert knowledge and expertise to support you at every stage. You will be taught by members of our large team of academic staff, the topics of whose research and publications cover music from prehistoric and medieval periods to music of the present day. Particular areas of specialism in Musicology include music and gender, film musicology, theory and analysis, early music, source studies and editions, historical musicology, and cultural musicology.

You will have access to the University of Huddersfield Music Library, which is complemented by the holdings of Heritage Quay, who host the British Music Collection (over 60,000 scores and recordings), the archive of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and the British Dance Band archive (21,000 recordings from that genre, recorded and released in the UK between 1911 and 1939).

Music at the University of Huddersfield has an international reputation, and hosts what is possibly the largest postgraduate community in music in the world. You will benefit from attendance at the regular Music Research Seminars, whose speakers include internal and visiting specialists each week. You will be a member of the Centre for Music, Culture and Identity which provides a focus for musicological research in the department. It includes the Popular Music Research Group, whose expertise in pop musicology are particularly related to metal. CMCI maintains strong connections with other research centres, including CeReNeM – notably the Music and Democracy research group – and ReCePP, whose members are performers and practice-based researchers across wide stylistic contexts.

Furthermore, the Music team regularly hosts specialist international conferences in Musicology, including the Biennial International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music (2018), and Music Since 1900 (2019), the Performance Studies Network Conference (2021), and Roberto Gerhard (2020). Such conferences open opportunities for PGT students to be involved in running and speaking at international symposia, forming networks with other researchers, and exploring avenues for the publication of their work.

The University of Huddersfield is proud to offer a superb range of purpose-built facilities for Music Performance, including two concert halls (St Paul’s Hall, and Phipps Hall), recording studios, individual practice rooms, and teaching rooms. Student performers can use the department’s extensive collection of specialist instruments, all purchased and maintained to professional standards, including early music instruments, three organs and over fifty pianos. Students on the MMus Musicology are welcome to participate in relevant ensembles.

The University presents regular concerts throughout the academic year, hosting a wide variety of professional performers across a range of genres and styles. Additionally the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and Electric Spring offer performances given by leading practitioners within the field of new music.

On graduating from this course you will have developed specific advanced skills required for doctoral level scholarship and for a range of careers in professional music, such as portfolio careers that might include teaching and other pedagogical contexts, public engagement events, arts administration, music promotion, and further scholarly work.