Our Music PhD programmes enable you to pursue advanced research in the areas of classical, popular, world, contemporary, early, folk and traditional music through a range of approaches. These include practice-based research, and musicological and theoretical inquiry.

Practice-based research focuses on composition, performance, improvisation and other forms of multi-media work.

Areas of musicological and theoretical inquiry can include the following approaches:

cultural and critical
historiographic
ethnomusicological
music analytical
philosophical and aesthetic

If you choose to engage in academic research you are normally assessed by a thesis of no more than 100,000 words for PhD and 50,000 words for MPhil. If you choose to undertake practice-based research you will normally submit a portfolio (eg of scores, sound files, video files, other forms of documentation or some combination of these), supplemented by a related dissertation to explain the larger, practice-based component.