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Contents 1 The Music Faculty 2 The Undergraduate Course 2.1 Part IA 2.2 Part IB 2.3 Part II

The Music Faculty

The Music Faculty at Cambridge is located on the Sidgwick Site, on the west side of town. The buildings include the old faculty building (an arts and crafts style house, which houses the administrative offices, the board room, and various offices for academics), and the new faculty building, centred on West Road Concert Hall, which was built in the early 1990s. This building has many facilities, including the Pendlebury Library, a recital room, various practice and lecture rooms, the Cudworth Room (which houses the faculty's collection of keyboard instruments), a 500-seat concert hall, and various offices for Academics.

The faculty is relatively small, and takes between 60 and 70 undergraduates a year. Many of the supervisions in the second and third year of the undergraduate course are organise centrally, rather than through the colleges as would be expected in larger subjects. Whilst the undergraduate course is split up, as all Cambridge Triposes, between Part I (years 1 and 2) and Part II (year 3), it is important to note that in the music course there is a lack of coherence in the first two years, and each of the years has its own identity. As such I will address each separately.

The Undergraduate Course

Part IA

Part IA of the Music Tripos really is a baptism of fire. All of the courses are compulsory, and span the entire range of musicological and theoretical topics that the faculty deals with. The courses at present are: Harmony (writing classical string quartets, early 19th century lieder accompaniments, baroque-style immitative writing over a ground bass), Counterpoint (Three part Palestrina-style immitative counterpoint, and Baroque fugal exposition with invertible/double counterpoint), Two historical/musicological/ethnomusicological papers, Analysis (music from 1700-1828, with an emphasis on topical/semiotic analysis), General Musicianship (Aural tests on transcription of atonal lines, three-part counterpoint, orchestration, aural analysis etc. and Keyboard tests, sightreading quartets, sight-transposition of Bach Chorales, sightreading 3 part counterpoint in alto, tenor and bass clefs, harmonising a melody at the keyboard, and realisation of a figured bass). Ok, so that's a lot of stuff, and depressingly Cambridge expect you to be good at all of it. It is extremely rare that this is the case for any of the students (last year only two students achieved a first at Part IA). Each of the six modules is examined with a three hour exam, except for General Musicianshp, which is examined by a 3 hour aural exam and a 10 minute keyboard test. It is a nasty course, you will have more supervisions than almost any other arts students, and you are consistently made to feel that you can't keep up. Thankfully, after the first year, you're allowed to bin most of the skills they've tried to make you build up, and get on with what you're interest in, whether it be musicology, composition, analysis, etc.

Part IB

Part IB really is a welcome break after the hell of first year. You have one less module, and you actually get some choice over what courses you're taking. All students must take tonal compositions (usually referred to by students as "Tonal Comp") - three compositions including a fugue, and Analysis (music from 1828-Present day). You then have a choice of papers for your other three, but must either take free composition, dissertation, or advanced keyboard skills. The other two papers tend to be based on forms of analysis or historical musicology. These other papers change each year. For these elective papers, each student is given between four and six supervisions. All courses are taught as lectures, although these tend to be slightly less formal, as many options only have about 15 students taking them.

Part II

Back to the hell of having six courses to do in a single year, but this time the format of the learning is different. There is a much wider range of courses offered. The coursework options are Tonal Comp, Free Comp, Dissertation, and Analysis Portfolio (2 analytic essays, using specified analytic approaches). There is also a chance to have your performance examined (but beware of harsh marking), and the Fugue exam, which involves 4 hours sat in a room with a pencil and paper with the hope that you'll write a fugue on one of five specified subject. There are plenty of other historical/ethnomusicological courses on a number of topics, all taught through post-graduate style seminars in which students are expected to actively contribute. Unfortunately, the fact that you have to take so many courses means that many students will have to sit papers that they are not particularly interested in. On top of this, each of the exam papers is three hours long, and you are expected to answer three questions of six set - this is a very low ratio of questions to answered compared to other arts subjects at Cambridge. As in the second year, students should expect 4-6 supervisions per module throughout the year. Expect to be busy.