The guide

Music

Arts & Design

The formal study of music: performance, composition and the theory underneath both. It sits at a level well past playing an instrument for enjoyment.

This suits you if…

Being evaluated on precision, on pitch and rhythm and harmony rather than on feeling alone, doesn't put you off. You can accept being merely average in a room where everyone else was also the strongest player at their own school, long before you get to call yourself exceptional again.

Look elsewhere if…

You are counting on this degree alone to build a performance career. Or you dislike being tested on theory and ear training rather than only your instrument. A conservatoire audition track, judged on playing rather than academic study, is the real route to a performance career. This page doesn't size that route up honestly enough to plan against.

What this subject actually is

You will also see it called

Music performance · Composition · MusicologyThe same subject, under a different department in a different country. Search for all of them.

What the first year is really made of

An audition got you in the door already playing at a level most of your school never heard. The first term promptly sits you back in a classroom for ear training, harmony and sight-singing, marked to a precision most performers have never been tested against. None of it has much to do with your instrument. You were the strongest player anyone at your school had met, and now you are an average first-year among people at the same level. That gap thins the class out more than any single hard topic does.

The catch

This degree doesn't, by itself, describe a full performance career. Our own closest destination for music is sound and composition work for film, games and media, not the concert or recording career many applicants picture. That performance track runs on a separate, audition-driven ladder, outside anything a general university application measures. Paid work is also markedly uneven, with far less correlation to raw ability than applicants expect.

The one hard requirement

A live or recorded audition to a set standard is close to a universal requirement for performance-track programmes. Unlike a portfolio, it can't be built up in the months before you apply. Years of instrumental training beforehand is the actual, non-negotiable prerequisite.

What to do about it now

The school subjects that actually matter

Sustained instrumental or vocal training well before you apply, not started in your final year
Music theory where it is taught
Mathematics

What admissions screens on, and what the first year assumes you already have. The only thing on this page you can start today.

Where it leads

Kinds of work this opens

Film, animation & sound

A list, not a prediction. Most people in these jobs did not study exactly this, and most people who study this end up doing something the list does not name.