Aims

- to develop core skills in contemporary performance as relating to the professional creative industries, wherein 'performance' embodies composition and arrangement.

- to develop critically informed understanding and perspectives concerning performance within a contemporary, popular and commercial context

- to encourage creativity and imaginative engagement with contemporary discourses and contexts, integrating a broad range of repertoire and critical-cultural perspectives

- to develop individual abilities in instrumental specialisms, applying them to collaborative, group performance

- to develop critically informed skills with regard to the development of aesthetic, artists’ profiles and contexts, learning to deal with the challenges and contradictions particular to a given mode of delivery or cultural framework.

Outline Of Syllabus

The module will introduce stage one students registered on the W301 BA Contemporary & Popular Music degree to critical, discursive perspectives concerning contemporary, popular music realization through performance. Through class discussion and practical group tutorial sessions, the diversity of experience and breadth of specialist interest that individual students bring through their prior personal engagement with popular music culture will be taken into account and applied to the manner in which class discussion and small-group collaboration is shaped and driven.

Teaching Rationale And Relationship

Lectures introduce ideas and offer scope for discussion of theoretical concepts and key repertoire relevant to the module topics, shaped and guided by the experience, interests and accumulated knowledge brought to class by its individual members. Such discussion and its findings are applied directly to practical engagement through seminars and set assignments during the course of semester one. Moreover, lecture content will introduce students to ways of negotiating the vast, multi-layered repertoire of contemporary (meaning present-day) music through critical and historical perspectives that, at the same time, place their own creative expression at the heart of how they respond. Lectures also analyse ways in which the post-digital networking environment offers myriad, imaginative ways in which musicians can get their work heard. Seminars will consist of practical work in groups, group discussions and assessed project preparation. Practical work and artist crit groups help students realise their ideas in a manner that explores aesthetic parameters of the contemporary, popular performance environment; collaborative, group, practical work will also be presented regularly in student concerts in preparation for final assessment.

Assessment Rationale And Relationship

The first two 10% group performances in semester 1 put into practice specific technical approaches introduced in lectures and through workshop-tutorials. The focused, restricted platform for these performances force students to be resourceful with limited materials, thereby breaking them out of long-unquestioned habits for preparing performance material.

The major (50%) group performances allows students to present and illustrate the development of skills and their capacity to work creatively, imaginatively and professionally within the context of specific contemporary aesthetic and stylistic frameworks. While individual skill and specialized instrumental technique are pursued in one-to-one tuition, they form only part of what students will be assessed on; students’ capacity to adapt those skills and techniques to an expressive performance context that forms part of a group response to the myriad challenges of contemporary pop music culture will also be key criteria of assessment.

Throughout the module groups will be expected to use improvisation as a creative tool - the improvised performance (10%) in Semester 2 provides a focal point for this element in the creative process.