For the BCU team, one of the objectives of our participation in the partnership is to gain insights that will aid our existing work in music scholarship as well as our teaching.
For instance, we've been offering an award in MA Music Industries since 2009 under the leadership of Andrew Dubber.
Dubber edits the New Music Strategies blog where you can download his widely read book The 20 Things You Must Know about Music Online, a work which informs much of our thinking about the challenges for music industries and culture in the digital age.
Readers across Europe will be pleased to know that Dubber's book is available to download in the following languages:
- Portuguese
- Chinese
- Spanish
- German
The MA Music Industries has an associated blog where students and staff discuss their work and which offers a rich insight into the nature of postgraduate teaching and learning in the Birmingham School of Media.
As an addition to MA Music Industries we have just launched some new MA awards that are informed by the ongoing partnership experience and our mobilities across the EU with our esteeemed partners and their contacts.
Our new awards, with links and some explanation of what they entail, are:
MA Music Heritage
The history of music has become as increasingly important as its present. Popular music’s past, in particular, has become prominent in many cultural activities. We only have to think about the way in which the popular music heritage of cities like Liverpool, Manchester, Seattle, or Chicago define what we think of those places. Museums and galleries increasingly feature exhibitions about popular music heritage and there are even institutions dedicated to the Beatles, Nirvana and the Chicago Blues. A strategy for popular music heritage can be increasingly found in national and regional cultural policy. Fans, of course, have always been involved in un-official heritage activity and this has been enabled on a much grander scale by the internet.
Music heritage, though, remains a complex and contested term, interleaved with the commercial and cultural sectors and employing a wide range of activities. This masters course will provide students with the opportunity to explore how music heritage is being used and deployed by individuals, communities, organisations and institutions in both the physical and online environments. We ask some fundamental questions about what concept of heritage is being deployed and whose popular music heritage is being presented, by whom, and for what purpose? We will study the creative industry and cultural policy initiatives and interventions that have utilised popular music heritage and examine the role that popular music can play in stimulating the economy and tourism and as a form of ‘place making’. We will cover the core issues which occupy music heritage academics, practitioners and fans and music heritage as popular music culture. Students will be able to take a further option that will allow you to explore ways to make a living out of music heritage, or study its place within creative industry and cultural policy formation and intervention. Students will work closely with other students and staff from across the world who study on our Music Industries, Jazz Studies and Creative Industry & Cultural Policy MAs.
MA Jazz Studies
Jazz has been, for different people at different times, a mainstream pop music for teenagers, an art music for the cognoscenti, and a folk music for a people. Today it remains a significant cultural force with musicians and fans who feel a strong sense of commitment to its traditions and contemporary innovations. This masters course will provide students with the opportunity to explore jazz as a world-wide musical culture. We will cover the core issues which occupy jazz academics, fans and musicians alike, and jazz as a popular music culture. Students will be able to take a further option that allow you to explore ways to make a living out of jazz, curate its heritage, or study its place as in the cultural industries and cultural policy. Studentswill work closely with other students and staff from across the world who study on our Music Industries, Music Heritage and Cultural Policy MAs.
These awards build upon existing research expertise within the Birmingham School of Media where we have established international reputations for our work.
Teaching staff include: Prof Tim Wall, Dr Simon Barber, Dr Paul Long, Andrew Dubber and Jez Collins have strong track records in jazz studies and music heritage. The Jazz Studies programme was developed in consultation with our colleagues in the BCU Conservatoire.
As these award recruit students from September 2012, we hope to involve them and their work in the project, its sustainability and its assessment. Certainly, the practice in our awards which will inform our report to Leonardo and our readers in September.
