Composition

Immerse yourself in contemporary music, sharpen your skills and explore your creative voice. The MA in Composition is taught by a diverse team of internationally renowned composers who love to share their knowledge and expertise.

Course description

This course is under review for 2024 entry and we will provide an update in the next few months. Please contact the department for further information music-admissions@sheffield.ac.uk.

This course focuses upon composition of contemporary music and offers two distinct pathways. You can choose to specialise in instrumental composition, in which you will explore a broad range of compositional approaches and techniques with a strong emphasis on inquiry-led practice. This will include collaboration with professional performers and peers, resulting in numerous live premieres of work, and/or the scope for interacting across disciplines.

You may also have the opportunity to make mixed-media work, and collaborate with artists working with other media (visual, design, text). Alternatively, you may specialise in electronic/electroacoustic composition, in which you can explore creative applications of analogue/digital technologies, studio-based composition techniques, real-time audio processing techniques, aesthetics of sonic art, historical developments in electronic music, temporal/spatial-audio and post-digital aesthetics, amongst others.

At the start of the course, you will be offered intensive training in the knowledge and methods of your chosen field; this is followed by opportunities for independent research and exploration. By the end of the course you will have developed and refined your own compositional voice and will be able to situate creative work within a broader contextual framework.

The MA also includes composition for film and film sound recording, recognising training needs for those wishing to enter the creative industries as composers, sound designers and game contributors.

Sheffield is an ideal place to complete your MA in Composition. The departmentworks closely with the University's Concerts Series and oversees ensembles such as the Symphony and Chamber Orchestras, the Chamber Choir and the Folk Group, all of which you can compose for. The University of Sheffield Sound Studios is also home to Sound Junction, one of the UK's longest-running and most significant concert series dedicated exclusively to acousmatic, electroacoustic music. This provides students with a prestigious platform to perform their work.