Music

Advanced Composition Portfolio

Module code: W3067
Level 6
30 credits in autumn semester
Teaching method: Seminar
Assessment modes: Coursework

This module develops advanced practices in composition through a portfolio that reflects your own creative interests. Through a range of case studies from early music to contemporary music, including ensemble music, jazz, improvisation and orchestral music, the seminars focus on practical and aesthetic issues and are geared towards assessed projects as well as helping lay the foundations for larger-scale work.  

The seminars provide you with peer and tutor feedback, as well as guidance on your assessed projects. In our sessions we will be looking at case studies to encourage a range of musical perspectives. We will be having practical in class exercises requiring you to use whatever resources you have to compose (software, hardware, instruments, notation). The module encourages you to research – by the end of the module you will have shared a short introduction to a piece of music or a genre (in any style) that is particularly important to you and influential on your own creative work.

Module learning outcomes

• Demonstrate compositional and arrangement skills (e.g. structural organisation, reasonable fluency in harmonic and rhythmic thinking, creative use of orchestration).
• Demonstrate advanced musical compositional skills (creative flair, the ability to tailor compositional and arrangement ideas to appropriate formats and large scale structural thinking).
• Analyse and critically evaluate texts (including musical scores).
• Reflect critically on their own and others creative production.