Degree Overview:

This BA (Hons) Music Performance and Acting for Film degree trains students in singing or instrumental performance alongside practical skills in television and screen acting. Students will join one of the most extensive musical performance programmes in the UK and have opportunities to audition for six orchestras, nine other large ensembles, five choirs and more than 70 small ensembles, and to take part in performance projects while honing the craft of acting on screen. This course is delivered by highly experienced practitioners in musical performance and in film and television acting.

Outline:

This degree is designed to be a practical and hands-on program. The typical study week will include performance technique classes, lectures, seminars, tutorials, studio-based workshops, and application of practice. Outside of scheduled classes, students will complete independent study including researching texts, completing individual or group tasks, and working on their assignments.

Year One:

Ensemble: Students will produce a professional standard performance, demonstrating confidence within their chosen repertoire(s) and technical and expressive maturity.
Iconoclasts to Icons: Students will explore the importance of observing and contrasting Screen Acting technique and styles through lectures and screenings and will be expected to articulate the context of performances in group discussion.
Introduction to Film Industry: This module walks students through the various paradigms within the film industry and the use of filmic devices for dramatic and expressive intention.
Masterclass: This module develops students’ basic performance and communication skills and their sense of performance context.
Performance Development: This includes 1 to 1 tuition in the student’s selected instrumental or vocal study.
Professional Resilience: This module will explore a range of different strategies designed to offer support to the emerging arts practitioner and will introduce students to a number of different models of successful self-development.
Screen Acting 1: This module explores the complete timeline of a screen acting performance; from initial preparation through to final delivery.

Year Two:

Classicism: This module will consider the Classical style in music primarily through the work of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.
Ensemble: Students will produce a professional standard performance, demonstrating confidence within their chosen repertoire(s) and technical and expressive maturity.
Film Story: In this module, students will use weekly film study to explore the elements needed in the creation of story, specifically in the process of devising for film.
History of Modern Jazz: This module will look at jazz from two perspectives.
Music and Society: This module will explore a range of topics, including: the canon, music and gender, music and mediation, music and education, music and cultural identity, popular and elite traditions.
Music and the Community 1: Music and the Mind: This module considers how music defines and identifies communities.
Performance Anxiety: Students will examine the problem of performance anxiety and stage nerves and study the theoretical background and how to effectively deal with anxiety.
Performance Development: This includes 1 to 1 tuition in the student’s selected instrumental or vocal study.
Preparing Young Musicians for Assessment and Performance: The practical, placement experience allows students to become a beginner all over again by learning a ‘new’ instrument during this term, recreating the feelings experienced by beginners.
Professional Resilience: This module will explore a range of different strategies designed to offer support to the emerging arts practitioner and will introduce students to a number of different models of successful self-development.
Reading Popular Music: Students will explore key critical texts and concepts such as authenticity, anthropology, ethnography, and textual analysis, applying these to a variety of models in contemporary popular music.
Screen Acting 2: This module explores the role and importance of group communication within practice, as students analyze their own skills and knowledge around performance techniques.
The Baroque: Students will explore a broad range of musical genres, ideas, styles, and constructional devices from the birth of opera in 1600, through the rapid development of concerti grossi, the mass and the oraotorio, to the seminal theoretical and compositional writings of Jean-Phillippe Rameau.
The Roots of Jazz: Students will explore the roots of jazz and focus on the development of jazz between 1890 and 1930 as students critically analyze the social, political, and cultural context in New Orleans.
Through the Lens: In this module, students will dissect and discuss the way in which actors interpret scripted characters to create a screen performance that is further moulded by a director.

Year Three:

Arranging for Jazz: Students will develop their ability to take standard repertoire from the jazz canon and rearrange it into their own personal vision, which is a key skill within the jazz domain.
Classics On Film: Students will be challenged to fully research, prepare, rehearse, and film a short monologue or duologue from a choice of scenes from classical works.
Club Music: Students will examine how music is used in clubs, the motivations of clubbers themselves, and the development of the role of the DJ.
Communicating Music Through Movement & Gesture: This module explores the opportunities that exist for enhanced communication within the formal performance context, using the performer’s own physical projection of self and personal narrative of intention.
Ensemble: Students will produce a professional standard performance, demonstrating confidence within their chosen repertoire(s) and technical and expressive maturity.
Film Combat: In this module, students will organise, prepare, rehearse, perform in, and edit a short filmed fight sequence.
Group Teaching: Students will engage in workshop activities to explore the potential of strategies and material that could be used in a range of teaching contexts.
Introduction to Fundraising in the Arts: The module will consider the third-sector in relation to the other two sectors, the legal structures for non-profit organisations and regional variations in regulation, alongside the charity model in at least one other country.
Musical Event: Students will focus on one or more major performance projects which will involve opportunities to work creatively with a variety of ensembles and collaborations, including those which cross arts disciplines.
One to One Teaching: This module introduces a range of techniques in structuring lessons, communicating expressive and performance based concepts and problem solving designed to create an exciting and stimulating learning experience for individual singers, dancers, and actors embarking on the early stages of study.
Opera: This module takes a chronological approach to the study of the genre, beginning with the early Baroque and offering examples of differing musical styles up until the first half of the 20th century, with a particular focus on the late 18th to mid 19th centuries.
Performance Development: This includes 1 to 1 tuition in the student’s selected instrumental or vocal study.
Personal Study: Students will have an opportunity to select an area of study of their choice over an extended period, to research and present their findings in written form.
Personal Study (Recital): This module sees students select an area of study in performance, and develop it over an extended period.
Personal Study (Written): This module provides students with an opportunity to select an area of study of their choice, to research it and present their findings in written form, and to develop this over an extended period.
Post Modern Jazz: Students will seek to find answers in a postmodern jazz world and ask if the intrinsic identity of jazz has been lost and where it can go from here.
Professional Resilience: This module will explore a range of different strategies designed to offer support to the emerging arts practitioner and will introduce students to a number of different models of successful self-development.
Romanticism: This module will develop the student's confident and probing analytical style with a close exploration of compositional intention, particularly where this is allied to programmatic or narrative elements in the models they study.
Screen Acting 3: The importance of achieving high standards of creativity and communication within performance work will be emphasized in group lessons and in formative performance assessment.
Structures and Politics of Rock Music: Students will examine a broad range of contemporary musical texts to develop a broad definition of rock culture and use an in-depth study of a selection of significant artists and groups to provide insights into a range of stylistic and structural devices employed by rock musicians.
The Four Hander Project: Students will be challenged to fully research, prepare, and rehearse all four roles in both scenes then perform one of the roles in one of the scenes at very short notice for filming in a multi-camera set-up.

Careers:

This BA (Hons) Music Performance and Acting for Film degree will prepare students for their future career. Students will have the opportunity to develop a broad range of skills to enhance their CV and their employability. As performers, alumni have gone into:

West End productions (as stage performers, musical directors, and pit musicians)
UK and International small-scale touring theatre
Film and TV in both the UK and US
Edinburgh Festival
Cabaret
Roles including stage managers, arts managers, and producers picking up contracts in the UK and around the world
Commercial or independent film production
Commercial television
Video production

BA (Hons) Music Performance (Film Acting) draft

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