It's not just Clean Bandit who studied Music at Cambridge. The Cambridge Music course is one of the best in the country and has several famous alumnae and teachers, including Judith Weir, Joanna MacGregor, and John Elliot Gardener. This degree has a strong academic focus, and develops students as musicologists, with modules mainly focusing on history, analysis, and composition.
The Faculty building has excellent resources, including a concert hall, a designated music library, a studio, a mac suite, and period and gamelan instruments. They also host regular concerts, lectures, and workshops for composers, musicologists, and performers alike.
The Cambridge course is particularly good for allowing you to focus on your strengths. As you progress, you will have more and more opportunities to choose modules according to your personal interests. This means that students, having worked out whether their strengths lie in performance, composition, or musicology in their first year, can refine this further in their second and final years.
The Cambridge course combines theoretical and practical elements of music. In your first year, you take two history papers, tonal skills and aural tests, an analysis paper, an introduction to musicology, and two half papers (a mini dissertation, a recital, a composition portfolio, or an optional module). These are assessed through examinations, coursework, and a 2-day ‘takeaway paper’ for harmony and counterpoint.
In your second year, you take compulsory history, analysis, and tonal skills papers again, but you can now choose half of your modules yourself – some examples of previous modules include Jazz Age Paris, Ethnomusicology, Music and Science. Again, you may opt to do a recital, composition and/or dissertation.
In your final year, you finally have the opportunity to choose whatever you like, taking six papers total. The options are dependent on the faculty staff members available but have included Music Psychology, Brahms’s Ein Deutsches Requiem, British Popular Music, Tudor Music, and Film Music. You can also choose to take a performance recital, a keyboard or choral recital, a dissertation, or a composition portfolio. This means that you could end up with just one written paper in your final year, or absolutely no composition or performance modules at all.
You will need to have A-Level music (or equivalent), although Grade 8 Theory may be accepted as a substitute. Usually, a Grade 8 on your instrument is not needed, although this is the case for some colleges.
Music is a small medium course with an average intake of around sixty and has a balanced ratio of female to male students. Although the course has an academic slant, the extracurricular performance standard in Cambridge is second to none, meaning that many who take this course then take a postgraduate conservatoire course in performance, conducting, or composition. The academic basis also sets you up incredibly well for Masters and PhD study in Musicology, and many students stay on at Cambridge to do just that. However, the skills you learn here apply to media, journalism, arts administration, and even seemingly remote sectors such as law and finance.
