• Inactive for Year: 2024/25

• Module Leader(s): Dr William Edmondes
• Co-Module Leader: Dr Mariam Rezaei

• Owning School: Arts & Cultures
• Teaching Location: Newcastle City Campus

Semesters

Your programme is made up of credits, the total differs on programme to programme.

Aims

To develop a core understanding of contemporary experimental and interdisciplinary practice in 21st century vernacular music-making including beat-making, improvisation, DIY resourcing, online publishing and digital video.

To develop core skills in improvisation, spontaneous performance, intuitive practice and video.

To develop critically informed understanding and perspectives concerning pop, improvised and experimental music culture .

To encourage creativity and imaginative engagement with contemporary discourses and contexts, foregrounding a DIY, alternative media, digital and commercial dimension inherent in popular music.

To develop individual abilities in recording, non-notated performance, arranging/mixing and elementary video production.

To develop critically informed skills working within a contemporary production, publishing and distribution environment constantly reconfigured through advancements in technology and online platforms, but also integrating contemporarily relevant revival of various hardcopy formats.

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 deploys the non-genre-specific umbrella term ‘Free Music’ loosely to encompass a range of established, current and emergent practices within contemporary pop as a reflection of a real-world/professional environment that draws no practical distinction between genres such as Hip Hop, Trap, Drill, Noise, Jazz, Free Improv and electroacoustic composition.

The module is delivered through three distinct projects across both semester focusing on the development of core skills through a combination of lectures that provide a historical and reportorial context for Free Music Practice (supplemented by readings, screenings and class discussion), and practical projects through which students develop their own ideas and identities within Free Music disciplines.

A number of contemporary approaches to making music, sound art and video will be presented, and students will engage with these through workshops, tutorials, individual and group study. Topics covered will include electronic music, free improvisation, video, creative use of social media and other experimental creative practices. Students will also look and listen to repertoire that is relevant to the module, and a certain number of readings will be set to help students think through the key issues and work them into their artistic practice. The module provides a strong grounding for final year artistic/practical specialisms as well as providing alternative and innovative frameworks for professional practice.

Teaching Methods

Teaching Activities

Teaching Rationale And Relationship

Lectures introduce and offer scope for discussion of theoretical ideas and key repertoire relevant to the module topics. Students are directed to readings and listenings connected to the content of lectures, allowing an in-depth understanding of contextual issues. Moreover, lectures introduce students to ways of negotiating the vast, multi-layered repertoire of contemporary (meaning present-day, professional and ‘real-world’) 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 and seen. Practical work, artist crit groups and tutorials help students realise their ideas in a manner that explores aesthetic parameters and technological avenues with the help of teaching staff, but predominantly independently.

Assessment Methods

The format of resits will be determined by the Board of Examiners

Other Assessment

Assessment Rationale And Relationship

The portfolio allows students to focus on disciplines introduced throughout the semester that they consider to best represent their own emergent creative practice. While each of the three projects involves producing both individual and collaborative work as the module progresses, students are presented with the challenge of crafting individual pieces of work from each of the three projects.

Each of the three (mx. 300-word) commentaries will require students to place their practice in the wider cultural, critical-theoretical and philosophical context and to develop ways of articulating these in a distinctive manner that is less alienated from the creative work they produce – to that end working creatively with critical text will be included in lecture content.

Readings and repertoire case-studies (along with optional, evening film-screenings) are provided each week so that students gradually build up knowledge of the context of their creative work, engendering a strong relationship between creative practice and philosophical and critical reflection. Students are assessed on the degree of success and effectiveness with which they were able to formulate a vision for distinctive, new work and realise it. Presenting their work publicly as much as possible throughout the module (via online networking platforms and/or at public live events) will be encouraged in helping students bypass the concern for marking criteria per se and produce work that ‘does what it’s trying to do.’ However, the marking criteria will be foregrounded from the start – research and professional rationale will form a significant part of group discussion from early on in the module. The portfolio is assessed more directly on students’ understanding and development of skills specifically within a Free Music context; the essay is intended to provide contextualisation and to further evidence the extent to which the practical work has responded to the module content.

Reading Lists

• MUS2048's Reading List

Timetable

• Timetable Website: www.ncl.ac.uk/timetable/
• MUS2048's Timetable