Cultural Musicology (M.A.)

The transdisciplinary Master's degree programme "Cultural Musicology" offers you the unique opportunity to study the music of the world in depth from a cultural studies perspective. Methods and techniques are taught that appear to be characteristic of one of the three 'classical' sub-disciplines of the subject of musicology (historical musicology, systematic musicology, ethnomusicology) with the aim of exploring the common possibilities within these three focal points. This is done in the conviction that only in this way a musicology can emerge that does justice to its subject: Musics worldwide, and without favouring any particular music.

In the Cultural Musicology degree programme, you will learn to link and work on current musicological research fields with cultural-scientific theories and methods. The programme includes introductory courses on cultural analysis and theory as well as in-depth seminars in which musical practices are critically examined in their historical, social and spatial development and placed in cultural contexts. A large part of this is devoted to the analysis of music, which is carried out using a variety of techniques. You will deepen this knowledge and these skills in a research project carried out independently and individually supervised, which precedes the Master's thesis. Finally, the subject "Cultural Musicology" includes an internship that provides orientation in various professional fields.

The M.A. degree in Cultural Musicology qualifies students for professional activities in many fields of work: in libraries, archives and museums, in non-university musicological research institutions, in music management, in companies in the media industry. It enables specialised journalistic work for the press, radio, television or on the internet, and last but not least, it also offers the opportunity to deal in depth with research contexts through postgraduate studies that qualify for academic work at musicological educational institutions.