Overview
The Master of Music in Performance is a two-year course similar to the Master of Arts but with the addition of a Masters Project. The project can be a concert with commentary, a recording-based project, a dissertation or a mixture of these.
Your Project preparation is supported by a team of specialists and provides an opportunity for you to enhance your creative work through specialised academic study and practice-led research. Postgraduate students are a vital part of the Academy’s musical culture, working in a uniquely collaborative performance environment ideally suited to helping talented musicians — from across the globe — to achieve their musical ambitions. Students wishing to prepare applications for doctoral study will normally choose the MMus rather than the MA. The programme path and length can be discussed at the entrance interview and adjusted as appropriate, you are not tied to the option you choose when you submit your application in UCAS Conservatoires
Core Modules
- Performance classes
- Masterclasses
- Individual lessons for Principal Study
- Ensemble and Directed Ensemble coaching
- Lectures
- Seminars
- Academic supervisions
Elective Modules
The modules listed below will vary slightly each year in response to student needs and the evolving musical world.
Analysis and Aesthetics
This elective will explore both technical aspects of music analysis and wider aesthetic and musicological topics, with a particular focus on bringing these areas together.
Artist Development
Our Artist Development provision is here to prepare you practically, creatively and strategically for a sustainable career in the music profession. We want you to leave here as fully-rounded, creative and adaptable musicians, with the tools and know-how to gain employment in unpredictable times. Practical sessions and intensive electives through the year include working with online content, personal recording techniques, preparing professional documents, auditioning well, how to get funding, and self-employed finances. Artist Development forms a part of the broader range of your work and activities, which we assess over the course of your studies via a portfolio.
Attentive Listening
An elective designed to hone listening skills across a wide variety of styles and genres. For 90 minutes each week an eclectic selection of music is studied, with class discussions focussing upon analytical issues or matters of interpretation, and across history are also studied.
Composition
The Composition elective is available for postgraduate performance students who have prior experience of instrumental and/or vocal composition at degree level (or equivalent).
Concert Programmes and Programming
This elective explores a mix of historical and current factors that underpin programming decisions across a range of music-making experiences.
Concert Workshop
At the heart of this elective has always been the question ‘how do we communicate most effectively in concert scenarios?’ – eclipsing the more fundamental issue of ‘what is a concert?’
Creative Collaboration
A three-day intensive course in collaboration with Glyndebourne, led by Artistic Director Stephen Langridge, for singers, instrumentalists and composers. Through a series of workshops, the participants will explore methods of creating music theatre, and develop their abilities and skills as collaborative artists.
Contemporary Music Workshop
These classes bring together composers and performers in a collaborative environment in which musical ideas can be exchanged and developed, and the processes of collaboration explored. The classes include practical workshops where students develop their ideas, and seminars in which case studies in collaborative practice are examined. Each student participates in collaborative projects with at least one other student, developing musical materials that can take any form. Students participate in formal group presentations that include details of the collaborative processes and performances of the completed musical materials.
Creating your own performance projects
The focus of these workshops will be how to turn an idea into a small-scale creative project, from inception to promotion and performance.
Creative Programming and Research
This course critically examines different aspects of concert practice, exploring strategies for responding to sources (including recordings) and wider issues around programming, including audiences, venues and concert functions.
Enhanced Performance Techniques
Open to PG students of all disciplines, this elective enables performers to deliver with greater freedom and confidence, through enhanced preparation techniques.
Historical Performance
This Elective will give you the opportunity to explore historically informed performance on period instruments.
The Interpreter’s Workshop
Do you think of yourself as an ‘interpreter’ or a ‘creator’? (Dare we think of ourselves as ‘creators’?) When you practise a work do you consider what other performers have done as much as you try to discover the ‘composer’s intentions’? Close listening to recordings (historical and contemporary) can reveal a surprising range of possibilities for the performer that are not captured – or even suggested – in musical scores. In this class we establish a framework for asking useful questions about these possibilities and gaining technical/expressive resources in the process.
Open Academy
Open Academy is the Academy’s Learning, Participation and Community initiative, working with around 6,000 people beyond our enrolled students and staff each year. As the importance of participatory and community music programmes in areas including education, health and wellbeing continues to grow both in the UK and internationally, it is crucial that our students have the opportunity to obtain skills and experience in this exciting and expanding area of work. Open Academy offers lectures, seminars and workshops alongside hands-on practical experience in the field.
Performing Experimental Music
This elective provides an introduction to performing music in C20th and 21st experimental music traditions.
Performing French Music
This elective is offered to instrumentalists, singers and conducting students, covering song, solo and chamber repertoire and orchestral works (for everyone’s mutual interest).
The Pianist’s Heritage
These sessions provide a unique opportunity for reflection and debate around key repertoire areas of the pianist, and around the most burning performance-practice questions of our time – crucially how these relate to expectations in the current music professions.
Principles of Chamber Music
The Chamber Music lectures are designed to enhance all aspects of practical chamber music.
Thinking about recording / The self-directed recording artist
Led by two critically acclaimed self-producing recording artists, five sessions exploring the challenges and opportunities for today’s musician.
Transcription and Arrangement
Transcription and Arrangement is an elective open to all postgraduate performance students. This elective explores the art of arranging and transcribing music for a variety of ensembles and contexts. It will be of particular use for students wishing to arrange existing music for their own chamber ensembles, such a string quartets or wind and brass ensembles.
Entry Requirements
Academic Qualifications
You will usually hold a Bachelor's degree at lower second-class honours (2:2) or higher, or an international qualification of an equivalent standard. This degree is normally, but not necessarily, in music.
Written Requirements
Unlike the Master of Arts (MA) track, the Master of Music (MMus) in Performance requires you to submit an example of academic written work plus a project proposal. This must be uploaded to your Acceptd application profile to demonstrate your readiness for academic research alongside performance.
The academic written work must be on a musical subject and should be between 1,000 and 2,000 words in length. If you already have a longer piece of work, for example a thesis, please choose a representative extract.
In addition to the written work you should provide a Project Proposal in which you describe your plans and aims for a potential research project. There is no maximum or minimum word limit for this. Research projects can be variable in format: common models are a concert with an accompanying written commentary, or a written dissertation.
Your proposal should address the following questions:
- What is the subject area (repertoire, perspective) you wish to explore?
- What sort of structure do you envisage? Would the main project outcome take the form of a concert, or a written piece of work, or something else?
- How does this relate to your performance or composition interests?
- How does your proposed project relate to existing work in the field (including concert and performance practices that interest you, and/or published texts)?
At the application stage, the proposal is primarily a way for us to gauge your readiness to undertake a research project. If accepted, you will be not required to keep to your original plan, and in any case we would expect the plan to change significantly as your project develops.
In both the interview and the written work, we will be looking for evidence of your responsiveness and creativity as well as critical engagement, artistic maturity, and basic research and writing skills.
See Entry Requirements for more information.
Auditions
We want you to view your audition as an exploratory masterclass and a collaborative workshop rather than a rigid test. Our panel is looking for your historical curiosity, your technical adaptability, your expressive stylistic rhetorical choices, and your potential for growth. Try to relax, focus on sharing your interpretive storytelling, and let us hear who you are as a historical practitioner.
The Master of Music (MMus) selection process for Historical Performance is integrated into our postgraduate assessment framework. This allows candidates to demonstrate their artistic maturity, period stylistic precision, technical ornamentation command, and capacity for postgraduate research through a structured historical performance selection and an academic evaluation.
Your Audition Repertoire
For your postgraduate historical audition, you must prepare a stylistically authentic and technically rigorous solo programme that demonstrates your immersion in historical performance practices and rhetoric.
Repertoire Guidelines:
- Selection: You must prepare a varied programme of three contrasting pieces of your own choice.
- Stylistic Range: Your chosen items should represent a wide range of national styles (such as French, Italian, or German Baroque traditions) and display a balanced mastery over both structured formal works and free or highly decorated expressive idioms.
- Historical Instruments: Auditions are expected to be performed on historical instruments or authentic period replicas. If you are an instrumentalist applying with a modern instrument but showing a clear intention to specialise in period study, please contact the department administration in advance to standardise pitch and keyboard accompaniment needs.
Performance Note: For the first-round video submissions (video applications and international centres) accompaniment should be included where required (this can be a ‘minus-one’ track if you are unable to get an accompanist). The pieces can be recorded as separate videos.
For live, in-person auditions in London, you may bring your own accompanist, or an Academy accompanist will be assigned on the day.
What to Expect on Audition Day
1. Delivery Options & Practical Assessment
- In-Person (London): You will perform your prepared selection live for the specialist historical performance faculty panel. As live room time is strictly managed, the panel may choose to hear selected movements or specific stylistic extracts rather than full works. by the Academy with prior notification. Postgraduate candidates receive warm-up time at the Academy immediately prior to their assessment.
The Historical Performance auditions in London have a harpsichord tuned to A=415. Accompaniment at other appropriate historical pitches can be arranged and a fortepiano at A=430 or a piano at A=440 can be made available but you must contact admissions@ram.ac.uk at least two weeks before the audition to request these instruments. - Video recordings (video application, or international centres): You must upload your performance recordings to the Acceptd portal. Your files must contain unedited, high-quality audio-visual recordings. Ensure your camera framing allows the panel an unobstructed view of your physical technical execution and bodily coordination with the instrument.
2. Faculty Interview & Improvisation
All postgraduate historical performance in-person auditions involve a conversation and practical testing in the room, which may include:
- Sight-Reading: Reading a piece of historical notation, manuscript, or figured bass at sight.
- Faculty Interview: An interactive discussion with the panel regarding your historical research interests, your performance choices, and your career directions.
Postgraduate Academic & Application Profile
Because the Master of Music (MMus) is a research-led track that includes compulsory written components, critical portfolios, or a dissertation alongside your principal historical studies, your application profile must satisfy both practical and academic benchmarks.
Your digital application profile on the Acceptd portal must contain:
- Curriculum Vitae (CV): A current copy of your CV detailing your musical education, teachers, masterclasses, period ensemble collaborations, and performance history.
- List of all the works in your audition programme
- A written statement with details of about your musical background and training, your musical ambitions and reasons for applying for your chosen course at the Academy
- Written Material / Project Proposal: MMus candidates must submit an example of written work plus a project proposal to demonstrate that they possess the critical writing and analytical skills required to undertake postgraduate academic research.
- Spoken English Introduction (video application, or international centres): A short recorded verbal introduction introducing yourself, your musical background, and your professional goals to the faculty panel. Please tell us about your choice of audition repertoire, how it suits your playing and musical taste, and how knowledge of historical performance practice has influenced your interpretation.
Please note: Your ultimate course placement remains flexible. Because the practical audition is identical for both pathways, all MMus candidates are automatically considered for the Master of Arts (MA) track. If the panel feels your performance standard is excellent but your academic profile is better suited to a purely practical pathway, you may be offered an MA place instead. The programme pathway and choices can be discussed and adjusted with the panel during your assessment.
For more information see auditions.