Supportive Studies
Supportive Studies
Introduction
Central to each student’s creative development on the Undergraduate and Postgraduate programmes are LPMAM’s Academic Studies. We offer a full and varied range of innovative courses Industry Related, alongside traditional courses within the disciplines of Historical Musicology, Analysis, Performance Practice and Composition.
The key focus of these studies is to develop and hone students’ critical faculties both as performers and/or composers, and to prepare a new generation of musician to enter the music industry at 360 degrees.
This is delivered by ensuring that Years 1 and 2 of the Undergraduate programme comprise a common core whereas in Years 3 and 4, students are able to select their own specialisms from the vast choice of electives. We aim to offer flexibility to students to enable each individual student to develop their own musical development and career path in any direction inside the Music Industry.
Industry related courses
Music Law
Invaluable to a successful music career, LPMAM offers this unique course as an introduction to International Music Law, with special focus on the classical performer. Students receive an academic knowledge of: international employment law; orchestral employment contracts; concert agency contracts; recording contracts; broadcasting; and copyright royalties.
Music Business
Additionally, LPMAM offers tuition on a range of issues affecting musicians, including but not limited to career planning and accounting and examining the roles of music business organisations. The aim is to equip students with the knowledge needed to pursue a successful career in the present day music business. The Music Business strand aims to support the performance modules by promoting and instilling career-enhancing relevant skills at all Levels of the degree, through one core module per level ultimately nurturing a student’s employability in the modern music market.
• First year students explore the mechanics of music entrepreneurship, career planning, taxation, self-promotion (publicity and artist website developing), agency and representation, getting and administering session work, tour and artist management
• Second year students focus on researching the relationship between the musician and the current industry concerns and business innovation. Additional Business modules can also be studied
Music Publishing
A more in depth course about publishing deals and copyright assignment, mechanical royalties, performance royalties, synch fees, master-use fees, print royalties, new electronic transmissions, and foreign sub-publishing monies, music libraries and synchronisation.
Music production
Students are introduced to recording techniques and studio technology enabling a working understanding of all elements of the performance in a recording studio, as opposed to the performance on stage.
Historical & Social Context in Music
This course is designed to explore and debate the social context of Classical and Contemporary Music and reflect on how the composers and performers’ actions and attitudes were affected by events occurring around the time and place where they lived. This course will be expanded with lectures on “Historical and Social impact of music” and “Reflecting on Race and the BlackLivesMatter Movement”. It is also an introductory course to our unique courses in Music Diplomacy and Music Activism.
Music Diplomacy and Equality
This course is designed to explore the impact of Music in Diplomacy and Equality. It will also inform students on the current United Nations SDGs and its programme of Sustainable Development Solutions Network, inspiring them to combine visions of a better world, leadership to inspire action, and the energy and drive needed to realize the SDGs through music and the arts.
Music Activism
Music is an emotional tool and can effectively be used to convey a larger message and to stir action. Grammy Award Winner Ricky Kej, an ambassador for various agencies of the United Nations such as UNCCD, UNICEF, and other global organisations such as Earth Day Network and UNESCO MGIEP, will help students exploring, programming, performing and composing music with the purpose of bringing about a positive social impact on various environmental and societal challenges.
Music Journalism
Music Journalism is a specialised area of professional development giving students a unique addition to their skill set for their future careers. Basic journalistic skills are covered incorporating news-writing, interviewing skills and shorthand technique. Within this, students will gain an overview of opinion pieces, editorials and comments, focusing on how to express your opinion in a critically constructive way. Within this course, students will undertake comparisons between reviews for different audiences. Student’s will develop and improve their research skills and journalistic creative flair through Concert, CD, DVD and Book reviews with the aim to produce entertaining, challenging and informative copy.
Artist Development and Career Strategies
Led by established Artist Managers for Classical, Opera and Jazz, the Artist Development Program is designed to help students understanding the importance of branding, A&R, PR, Social Media Presence and Digital Marketing for the launch of their careers as performer or composer. The course will offer the opportunity for students to choose their own career strategy with knowledge and awareness, whether that is working directly with labels and managers or staying independent, or a mixture of the two.
DIY Career & Self-Promotion
This is an interactive course covering a wealth of conceptual approaches and practical tips to enable students understand the tools of developing and self-managing a career as independent artist. Nani Noam Vazan will share her insights into working without representation and how this can enable artists to build lasting and meaningful relationships with programmers that will result in more and better bookings.
Opera Management
The course is addressed to any student (not only singers or classical students) interested in Opera and Theatre Management. It will explore the Opera Industry and its history, before teaching the fundamental skills of programming, budgeting, co-production and audience development. The course will also analyse New Technologies and their application in the theatre management.
Performance Relaxation Technique
This innovative course offers a unique scientific approach towards understanding the musical brain. It will allow students to identify performance anxiety that often leads to physical tension/tendinitis/, mental stress and panic attacks. Though scientifically designed relaxation technique and analysis, students will be able to reduce performance stress and enhance mental health and well-being.
Psychology of the Performer
The unique course at LPMAM, is aimed to students of any instrument or course of study who wish to deepen some psychological aspects concerning the profession of performer in the music field. It is a path of psychology applied to the musician during which we will explore and address various issues related to the psycho-physical well-being, identity and performance of the musician. The course also offers itself as a support to observe, analyze and elaborate some aspects (problems) related to the profession of the musician, to one’s personal and musical research, to one’s identity and expressiveness, to the relationship with the public and the environment that surrounds us ( including all the actors involved in the musician’s career).
Stanislavskij Method in Opera
Following the notes made by the first encounter of Stanislavski with the Bolshoi Opera Singers, this course explores the application of Stanislavskij’s “method acting” in to the various dynamics of the Opera singing. Its aim is not only to develop a rounded awareness of the stage arts, but above all to deeply research the psychological emotions of the opera characters, stimulating the imagination through specific exercises and reliving personal emotional states that can be connected to the events of the role, so that its interpretation is as truthful as possible.
Stage Speech and/or Yoga for Musician, Alexander Technique
Stage presentation, relaxation and concentration performance skills at choice.
Focusing on the long-term development of student’s as performance professionals, the LPMAM Yoga, Alexander Technique and Stage classes aim to focus on the whole body of a Musical Performer. LPMAM see this as unique and essential to the well-rounded and sustainable progression of all students. Through these classes we aim to improve posture and prevent repetitive strain injury.
Concert Presentation
This course delivers a high professional level recital programme. In group weekly sessions, students work together to design, organise and deliver a recital programme. This will include: stage presentation; notes to the programme; performance; and constructive criticism of each other’s projects.
History of Concert Performance
This course component offers the student an ability to explore performance techniques and interpretative issues through the analysis of historical recordings and by comparing recording to one another. Additionally students will enrich their learning by analysing the historical development of instruments, the audience and the concert halls; together with an introduction to the theory and philosophy of historical performance. This enables students to evaluate repertoire and performance in both historical and contemporary contexts.
Supportive Studies Courses
Instrument Technology
A seminary specific about the history and technical making of each instrument. Unique cores of the LPMAM , it will be compulsory for the related instrument students, but also open to any other student interested in enriching their instruments knowledge.
It will be made by inviting instrument makers, instrument technicians and instrument sellers to show the differences and qualities of each instrument detail.
Music Performance Analysis & Technology
Also called Mirroring Creative Lab, this course offers students a holistic method to develop the observation and evaluation of their own corporeal engagement related to their own score interpretation and sound result.
The course takes advantage of a creative application of user-friendly technologies as mirroring tools to assist musicians in their self-studying. Especially in our new life condition, which imposes the challenge of social confinement and instrumental distance learning, students need to acquire their own rules for the analysis of their performance and for the implementation of technology in their practicing. This approach attempts to refresh the traditional teaching, mostly based on a passive professor-student mirroring imitation, and to give students methods, tips and tools to develop their own artistic autonomy and identity.
Analysis & Interpretation
This course aims to develop a music interpretation of pieces chosen from the student’s repertoire from the point of view of the composer. It will analyse the composing structure and the composer’s language and intentions towards specific notations and musical languages. This different approach to the analysis of musical processes enable the students to make new informed performance decisions.
History of Western Music
This two-year course focuses on the musicological, social and political context of composers within the western art tradition. It will be extended to history of Jazz, World and contemporary Pop music, to research and discover the influence and exchanges between “Classical Music” and popular music today.
Music and Identity
This course examines the origins of commercial music in terms of (sub) culture, gender and politics.
Performance classes
In order to link One-to-One tuition, Masterclasses and Concert Performances, LPMAM offer Performance classes in the later years of the Programme. These classes allow students to present work-in-progress and receive vital informal feedback from departmental staff and from their peers to perfect their performances. In this way, students gain invaluable understanding of all technical and interpretative issues, as well as developing their own self-evaluative skills in order to hone their own creative processes and performances, in addition to those of others.
Interdisciplinary Performance Classes
Unique to the LPMAM , this course is focused on the comparison of performance techniques and interpretative issues in correlation to each different instrument technicalities.
Every week all the BMus Year 3 will be assisting at a Taught 2 hours lesson for 1 or 2 Postgraduate students of a different instrument every week.
This will enable all students to discover different phrasing and respiration necessary not only for chamber music, but for new way of expressing their specific solo repertoire.
Keyboard Skills
The one-year curriculum covers score-reading, harmonisation, improvisation and accompaniment for piano students only.
Vocal Skills
This one-year curriculum covers vocal techniques for teaching the phrasing and respiration to all students of any level, on their first year at the LPMAM.
Vocal Balance Technique
Founded in the USA, the Vocal Speech Level Singing (SLS) is extremely effective as a rehabilitation method for vocal damage caused by poor teaching, years of abuse or medical intervention that in other cases could compromise or even end a career, the Speech Level Singing trains the proper vocal cord muscles and relaxes the outer, unnecessary swallowing muscles so the vocal cords can be allowed to make their proper adjustments in balance with the air.
Secondary Piano Course
This curriculum is teaching the basis of piano playing and accompanying for up to the level of Grade 4 Piano for all non-keyboard students.
Theory Grade 6 to 8
Aural Training
This is mandatory during the first two years of the BMus. Training focuses on pitch, rhythm, texture, timbre, analytical and stylistic awareness.
Chamber Music and Orchestral Ensemble
This is essential to the Core Programme where the student learns via a traditional method of preparing small or large groups of performers for concert performances. All students participate in chamber music work as part of the Programme. Smaller ensemble work is mostly student-led with periodic support and coaching by LPMAM staff.
For composers this mode of study is designed to enhance and develop:
• Productive working relationships, essential to advanced musical creation
• An ability to work independently and autonomously
• The environment where creative ideas can be realised in live performance with accuracy and efficiency
• An in-depth knowledge of instruments/voices
Introduction to Conducting
All students are taught the basic elements of baton technique, from beating patterns to influencing sonority.
Foreign Language
A performance-focused career which involve concert tours around the globe, encountering professionals in many different languages and cultures. LPMAM therefore consider it a fundamental part of a student’s development to learn at least one additional language to English, and their native language.