Master of Music in Experimental Performance

at Birmingham City University - City Centre Campus United Kingdom

The launch of our Eastside Jazz Club has helped consolidate the integral role that Royal Birmingham Conservatoire has to play in a major UK city that enjoys a thriving jazz scene. While Birmingham’s jazz scene has been established over many years, our bespoke venue promises an exciting future for Jazz in the city.

Our Jazz Department is based around the Club, where student musicians share a platform and get invaluable side-by-side performance experience with the best on the scene, whom we welcome to our stage on a regular basis.

This course meets with the needs of the modern jazz performer – it places emphasis on practical work, with the majority of time dedicated to one-to-one lessons, small group coaching and private practice. You'll study modules that have been specifically and skilfully designed for jazz musicians, and as part of your learning we encourage you to explore in depth the relationship between improvisation and composition, which is central to developing your individual voice. You will graduate as a versatile, professional musician who is knowledgeable about the entrepreneurial opportunities available to you, and aware of the commercial realities for musicians joining today’s UK jazz scene as a portfolio musician.

Delivered by performers, band leaders and composers who enhance their teaching with professional experience, insights and connections, the course hones both your performance and professional awareness.

With individual specialist tuition throughout all four years of the course you will get the individual attention you need to prepare for a successful career in the music profession.

As well as having our own club that has taken its place on Birmingham’s vibrant jazz scene, our students enjoy professional experience opportunities with external gigs that familiarise them with the industry – for example through our partnership with Cheltenham Jazz Festival – one of many ways we prepare you for the future.

What's covered in this course?

The BMus (Hons) Jazz course is a specialist course for performers in jazz. Its main aim is to prepare students for a career in the music profession in the field of jazz. At the heart of our course's philosophy is the ideal of the informed musician; someone who is able to combine both advanced skills and musical knowledge in the advancement of their musical career. The BMus (Hons) Jazz course therefore aims to develop the specialist skills, the theoretical, historical and practice-based knowledge and to encourage the individual creativity required for you to become an independent learner, a critical thinker and a reflective practitioner.

You will be taught by performers, band leaders and composers, who are ideally placed to share their professional experience, insights and connections. With their guidance, you will hone both your performance skills and your professional awareness.

Our BA (Hons) Textile Design degree courses nurture fresh thinking and industry-ready creatives through a dynamic and carefully structured three-year program.

Our Embroidery option appeals to students who love to build onto and into surfaces, and enjoy working with diverse materials and threads. Drawing on the rich heritage of the subject, the focus during the course is on exploring the new possibilities with the materials and technologies that exist today. Alongside hand skills, including tambour beading and goldwork, you become confident with using specialist digital embroidery software and equipment. Students often work onto surfaces they have printed, creating designs with rich surface qualities and dramatic compositions. Ideally suited to working within the luxury end of the market, there are a wide range of applications for embroidery including performance, illustration and visual merchandising.

Studying with us will provide you with the skills, insights and experiences required to succeed in a broad scope of professional textile-related roles. Embroidery students secure placements with fashion and interior companies, design studios, designer-makers, arts organisations, costume departments, stylists and trend agencies.

By the end of your degree you will have a clear vision of where you fit in the industry and a tailored professional portfolio to take with you. Our BA (Hons) Textile Design: Embroidery graduates are employed as Couture Embroidery Designers, Studio Designers, Designer Makers, Artists and Facilitators and Trend Forecasters. They also take up other roles where their material sensitivity, creativity and problem-solving is valued.

Our brand new hub for the arts in the thriving Eastside of the city has been purpose-built to stimulate creative minds within an open-access, contemporary studio environment. You will become a part of our lively and close-knit student community and be guided by an experienced and passionate team of staff who value the importance of getting to know you as an individual.

Want to study investment finance in the UK, and take the first step towards a career in investment banking? Our BSc (Hons) Finance and Investment course with its robust content and unique features allows you to stand out from the crowd when you graduate.

Our course is focused on practical applications of financial skills in the investing world, qualities that are in high demand in modern finance and investment management sectors.

The course will develop your transferrable skills embedded across different modules on the course as well as your engagement with our Graduate+ employability programme. The course is also accredited by Chartered Institute for Securities and Investments (CISI). Designed to equip you with technical knowledge and skills in line with the curriculums of professional bodies such as the CFA Society UK, CFA Institute USA and CISI UK, as well as a range of employability attributes, the course will develop you as a work-ready graduate for careers in Finance and Investment across different industries.

As you progress, you will become more effective and creative in problem solving, as well as being able to critically advise individuals and companies in the UK and internationally. The modules are designed to enhance and develop your theoretical understanding from an academic perspective but also to apply acquired knowledge to the finance and investment sector.

The course is designed with some mandatory subject areas which provide the key underpinning knowledge for the course however allows you an opportunity to select some subjects based on your specific areas of interest. Therefore, during the second and final year of the course, there will be more flexible learning opportunities that will enable you to specialise in particular subject areas, as well as allowing you to tailor your course to a specific career path.

The course also has the option of a sandwich year, wherein you'll get to go on a year-long industry placement, giving you invaluable real-world employment experience.
The international focus of the course is derived from the diversity of the student body and the teaching team, plus the use of international teaching materials. Moreover, students can choose to spend a year or a full semester studying their modules overseas at a partner institution. While doing this course, you will have wide variety of opportunities to compliment your studies.

Based at the University’s new campus in the UK’s second city, you’ll live and study in a vibrant environment and engage with local, national and international businesses. You will be taught by highly qualified academics with industrial and professional experience.

Want to study both psychology and sociology at University? Our BSc (Hons) Psychology with Sociology degree combines both subjects and allows you to take a year-long industry placement.

Our innovative course will give you a deep understanding of how the core and specialized areas in psychology and sociology contribute to our understanding of contemporary issues. You will apply scientific reasoning and evaluate patterns of behaviour, gaining key transferable skills in communication, teamwork and problem-solving.

Sociology helps us make sense of the societies in which we live and our place within them. Our Psychology with Sociology course brings together two closely interrelated areas, allowing you to gain significant knowledge and insight.

What's covered in this course?

Over your three years of study, your Psychology modules will help you gain an understanding of a person’s mind, behavior and actions, while the Sociology side will equip you with the knowledge of group interactions and society as a whole. Practical in nature, our course will enable you to apply both Psychology and Sociology to human behaviour and society.

Our focus on contemporary and innovative learning practices will help you gain key employability skills, such as communication, teamwork and problem-solving, as well as key skills in two innovative, intriguing disciplines.

Our BA (Hons) Fashion Business and Promotion degree course enables you to explore a range of roles within the fashion industry, beyond the making and production of clothing.

Guided and supported by a knowledgeable, industry-experienced staff team, you will gain an education across the different fashion sectors and develop skills in order to undertake a number of industry roles, including Buying, Marketing and PR, Trends forecasting and Event Management.

What's covered in this course?

You will learn how fashion roles work together, as well as commercial and consumer and competitive awareness.

You will work on a live project, as well as industry-focused briefs across the first two years and  benefit from regular industry guest speakers.

Throughout the course, we will develop your business knowledge and language, preparing you for delivering presentations, teamwork, writing reports and build skills in creating both paper and digital visual work with the aid of CAD packages.

Our postgraduate courses in Music Technology provide an opportunity for composers and composer-performers to experiment with and develop expertise in the creative application of established and new music technologies.

Royal Birmingham Conservatoire is an internationally important centre for performance and composition with technology, especially live electronics. An example of its work is the highly acclaimed Integra Live project, an application that makes it easy to use interactive audio processing to create new music.

As you might expect, in this context, our postgraduate courses in Music Technology provide an exciting opportunity for composers and composer-performers to experiment with and develop expertise in the creative application of established and new music technologies.

This course will address the specific challenges and opportunities of the luxury sector and is the perfect choice for students that see their future careers with premium, high-end and luxury brands.

We enable you to become a confident leader and an innovative thinker, learning how to approach brands and decide their place within the market. You’ll learn how luxury brands are managed in the international marketplace, as well as looking at branding from producer and consumer perspectives.

What's covered in this course?

The course encourages you to develop the skills and competencies of future managers in the Luxury Industry. To do this, you will be capable of making management decisions at both a strategic and at a tactical level, emphasising the complexity and dynamics of business and management and an awareness of the nature of the various factors which influence management decisions.

The School provides a unique setting for students to observe their peers, taking advantage of the proximity of fashion and textile design students at the Parkside Campus and the School of Jewellery in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter.

The course encompasses numerous field trip opportunities so that you can reflect on your developing knowledge in relation to professional practice and the luxury industry.

There is commonality with other courses such Fashion Management, Luxury Jewellery Management and Global Media Management and you will benefit from shared lectures and practice where possible. Access to interactive digital technology will increase students’ ability to debate and share experiences in a global context and therefore integrate knowledge from different cultures.

Realise your potential as a creative practitioner and train to be a professional voice coach at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. You will gain highly specialised knowledge in a range of professional contexts and develop advanced expertise as a voice coach, teacher or performer.

Through reading, discussion, reflective writing and practising as a coach or teacher, you will relate theory and practice and learn the ways of thinking and working of a professional voice practitioner. Through full engagement with the opportunities the course provides, you will be prepared for work as a voice practitioner in private practice, in Further or Higher Education, in business, in theatre, performing arts and media.

Our BA (Hons) Textile Design degree courses nurture fresh thinking and industry-ready creatives through a dynamic and carefully structured three-year program.

Our Retail, Business and Marketing option typically appeals to students who are excited about the practical aspects of textile design but have skills and interests in the business side of the creative industries and love working as part of a team. The focus on the course is on gaining a broad practical understanding of textile design and complement this with specific knowledge and experience of research, report-writing, planning, management and communication approaches.

Studying with us will provide you with the skills, insights and experiences required to succeed in a broad scope of professional textile-related roles. Students secure placements within buying, marketing and visual merchandising departments within the retail sector, as well as work at magazines, with arts organizations and for trend prediction agencies.

Our BA Hons Costume Design and Practice degree course will prepare you as a designer practitioner within a breadth of performance genres.

Develop a range of career-specific skills within costume design and practice in a city culturally rich with dance, theatre and the creative arts. You will develop a range of skills applicable to a career within costume design and practice. Birmingham is a city culturally rich with dance, theatre and the creative arts, and collaboration with many of these creative partners is encouraged and embedded within course content. Staff delivering the course are both practitioners and researchers who continue to contribute to their discipline.