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Advanced Study options offer the opportunity for in-depth study around specific subjects relating to the research of the academic teaching each of the options. Each of the options is designed to support, develop and refine the historical and critical approaches in musicology covered in previous years of the programme to a higher level.  

Students taking MUSC30510 take two of the options on offer. The topics for 2026-27 are:  

Semester 1:

Traditional Music in Georgia (Prof. Caroline Bithell) 

Bach's Cantatas in Context (Dr Andrew Frampton)

Semester 2:

Jazz Historiography and Criticism (Dr Alexander Gagatsis)

 

Further details on each option can be found in the syllabus section below.

 

MUSC30510 and MUSC30520 cannot be chosen together.

Available as free choice: Yes, 'Prerequisite in a relevant Level 2 Music course, or by agreement with the Course Director’

This course-unit aims to enable students to study a particular topic within a current branch of musicology in depth.  

 

Jazz Historiography and Criticism (Dr Alexander Gagatsis)  

The purpose of this course is twofold. First, ‘Jazz Historiography and Criticism’ explores a wide range of jazz styles in their social and political contexts. Jazz offers a unique lens onto the modern history of the United States and this course views the development of jazz as a chronicle of North America's social, political, cultural and intellectual history. We will interrogate jazz’s position at the intersection of avant-garde and popular, modern and traditional, and investigate its complex interactions with the wider world. Along the way, we will explore issues of gender, sexuality, class, geography, race and ethnicity in the history of jazz, where they have frequently been masked. Second, in exploring successive transformations of the music, its performance, consumption and cultural status, we will engage with the ‘New Jazz Studies’, a discipline proclaimed sometime in the early 1990s, which signaled the flowering of interdisciplinary research on jazz. Until then musicologists had spoken of jazz in terms appropriate for the analysis of European art music, making jazz an imperfect version of classical music rather than something examinable in its own right. Since then, scholars have broadened the horizon by emphasising the roles of culture but have focused exclusively on the role of jazz as a social medium. In recent years, ‘the music itself’ has more often been the premises of scholars working within the field of performance rather than jazz studies. Where does this leave jazz?  
 

Bach’s Cantatas in Context (Dr Andrew Frampton)  

This module seeks to provide an in-depth introduction to Bach studies, and the specialist study of German music of the early eighteenth century more broadly, through the lens of J.S. Bach’s vocal works, with a particular focus on the church cantatas. The module is organised thematically, deliberately exposing students to a wide range of key topics and scholarly perspectives. We will place the Bach cantatas in their liturgical and theological contexts, and examine a range of methodological approaches to understanding, analysing and interpreting this music. A thorough understanding of the Bach cantata repertoire then provides the context for a study of the great sacred vocal works—the St John and St Matthew Passions and the Mass in B minor—in the final weeks of the course, and their relationships to the Leipzig cantata cycles. Finally, we will look at the reception of Bach’s sacred vocal works and issues surrounding the historiography of Bach studies into the twenty-first century.  

Throughout the module, emphasis is placed on discussion of primary and secondary source materials, the acquisition of specialist skills for the study of this repertoire, and the deep links between scholarship and performance. Students will learn how to interpret and analyse original sources, including Bach’s autograph manuscripts and original performing parts, and how they provide evidence of compositional process and contemporary performance practices. Traditional methods of source studies and formal analysis will be brought into dialogue with newer models and discourses surrounding material culture, performance studies, embodiment, emotion, class, and gender. Each week, representative works will be studied in-depth, providing students with a cross-section of Bach’s vocal output in its myriad—and often surprising—forms.  

 
Traditional Music in Georgia (Prof. Caroline Bithell)  

·      This option focuses on traditional music and dance in Georgia (Caucasus) and its journey from national folklore to world heritage.  

·      We will examine the intersections between (a) forms of national folklore assumed to have their roots in an ancient past, (b) musical transformations and modes of cultural production that emerged in the Soviet period

Seminars, including individual presentations by each student, and offering formative feedback on the presentations and on ongoing work.

Additional one-to-one feedback available through consultation hours, or by making an appointment. 

By the end of this course students will be able to:

• Demonstrate detailed knowledge and conceptual understanding of the selected topic and related issues;
• Demonstrate a good command of the available secondary literature.

By the end of this course students will be able to:

• Synthesize and evaluate a wide range of material relating to the topic;
• Interpret primary texts, engage with secondary literature, and formulate their own arguments.

By the end of this course students will be able to:

• Articulate, discuss and support findings coherently in both written and verbal form;
• Work effectively both independently and in groups towards clearly delineated goals.

By the end of this course students will be able to:

• Produce high-quality work independently with self-motivation and critical self-awareness;
• Demonstrate well-developed skills in the use of library and resources.

Assessment Task	Formative or Summative	Weighting
Option 1 (either topic) Written Exam	Summative	50%
Option 2 (the other topic) Essay OR Written Exam	Summative	50%

 

Oral feedback on presentations

Formative feedback on essays and/or mock examinations

Written feedback on examination

Additional one-to-one feedback (during the consultation hour or by making an appointment, or by email)

Reading lists for each of the topics are provided by the lecturer concerned. Titles of general support include:

Beard, David, and Kenneth Gloag, Musicology: the Key Concepts (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005)

Born, Georgina, and David Hesmondhalgh (eds.), Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music (Berkeley and London, 2000).

Cook, Nicholas and Mark Everist (eds.), Rethinking Music (Oxford, 1999).

Clayton, Martin, Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton (eds.), The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction (New York and London, 2003).

Crist, Stephen A. and Roberta Montemorra Marvin (eds.), Historical Musicology: Sources, Methods, Interpretations (Rochester, NY, 2004).

Herbert, Trevor, Music in Words: A Guide to Researching and Writing about Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Korsyn, Kevin, Decentering Music: A Critique of Contemporary Musical Research (Oxford, 2003).

Taylor, Timothy D., Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Durham, NC, 2007).

Williams, Alastair, Constructing Musicology (London, 2001).