Music Studies at Royal Holloway

Aside from performance and composition, a music degree involves studying texts, practices, cultures, and institutions. It is a particularly rich and intellectually stimulating degree, and undergraduate music students touch on issues in history, sociology, ethnology, and philosophy, as well as the more specific areas of music history and theory.

The Music Department at RHUL received the highest rating for research in the UK in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise and its academic staff cover the very widest range of approaches to the study of music. This breadth is reflected in the recent publication of the first-year undergraduate textbook An Introduction to Music Studies, entirely written by academic staff at RHUL, and in the wide range of courses typically available to undergraduates. Some of the main areas of teaching include Western music history (wide-ranging but with many special courses in early music and music from the nineteenth century onwards), ethnomusicology, music theory and analysis of tonal, post-tonal, and pre-tonal music, performance, and composition of various kinds.

Early music

Royal Holloway has a long-standing international reputation for the study of early music. As part of the core study of music history, all students are introduced to music from the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods, and many take up the opportunity to continue their studies through optional courses that approach early repertoire through its social and political contexts, its compositional styles and notations, and through editing early sources. Staff and students are also involved in performing early music. For more information on early music research and performance among our staff, see the pages of Geoffrey Baker, Helen Deeming, Stephen Rose and Henry Stobart.

Music theory and analysis

At RHUL students are given a thorough training in the theory of tonal music, including approaches to small- and large-scale form, harmony and counterpoint, and specialized techniques such as Schenkerian analysis. There is also a focus on pre-tonal and post-tonal music, with students encountering suitable methods for analysis. The emphasis of theory training at RHUL is not to analyze music simply for its own sake but rather to equip students with the ability to grasp the workings of Western art music so that they can better understand its function and meaning in the society in which it was written as well as how it has continued to develop its function through history.

Ethnomusicology

Royal Holloway benefits from one of the largest concentrations of ethnomusicologists of any UK university. The staff's internationally recognized research and diverse regional expertise provide a rich and dynamic study environment. In addition to a core undergraduate Introduction to World Musics, many students choose option courses focusing on specific regions and issues, including options in ensemble performance. The department’s owns a fine set of Sundanese gamelan instruments - Gamelan Puloganti (Changing Islands) - and is home to a very large collection of Andean instruments, both of which are regularly used for performances and courses.