An Introduction to Music Studies

Why do you want to study music? Do you perhaps dream of spending three or four years developing advanced performing skills on one or more instruments, learning a little about the history of music and its theory on the side, and emerging from the experience with a degree certificate? That might seem an attractive enough idea, and most university music departments these days will offer you a range of performing possibilities alongside the more traditional academic courses. But as the teaching of humanities (of which academic music is a part) in the modern university becomes less a focus for the rigorous intellectual scrutiny of the history and artefacts of civilizations, and more a site for the development of competencies for the post-university workplace, you (and especially your parents) will rightly ask what practical use such study might be in the contemporary world. Studying the practice and history of music seems on the face of it too narrowly focused to be of much use to anyone but an aspiring school music teacher, an orchestral musician, or a music journalist – and there are far fewer jobs in those areas than there are music graduates. Fortunately, however, a music degree offers a more genuinely useful training for graduate life than might at first be imagined.

Like other humanities disciplines, but perhaps more so than any other, musicology (as study of music is generally called in the UK; the US splits this into “musicology,” broadly meaning music's historical and cultural contexts, and “music theory,” the study of music's structural and pitch organization) provides a breadth of training in transferable skills that will make you particularly valuable to other professions as a music graduate.