Undergraduate Music Course

The undergraduate Music course (‘Tripos’) is designed to introduce you to a broad range of music and to an equally wide variety of ways of thinking about and understanding it. At first the focus is on acquiring the skills you will need for university-level music studies, giving you a solid grounding in the techniques and history of the Western musical tradition, as well as an understanding of the many roles that music plays in today’s world. As you progress through the Tripos, you will be able to take specialised courses in different kinds of music as well as different approaches to it.

Although the course has a strong academic component, you can choose to study performance and composition in all three years, and you can also choose to spend most of your final year working with one or more staff members on individually designed projects in areas of particular interest to you, ranging from analysis and history to world music, popular music, traditional music, and so forth.

The Music Tripos leads to the BA degree after three years. Examinations are taken at the end of each year: Part IA after the first year, Part IB after the second, and Part II after the third. Parts IA and IB form a broadly based course, with some specialisation available in Part IB; Part II provides the opportunity to specialise further, as noted above.

The Music Tripos is described in detail on the Faculty of Music website. Although most candidates reading Music take all three parts of the Tripos, candidates who have already taken one part of another Tripos may transfer to Music (subject to approval), normally at the beginning of the second year.