Research is fundamental to a university’s identity. In universities, the boundaries of our academic subjects are stretched by the research work of the staff, and benefits of research find their way into the cultural and economic life of the nation, directly and indirectly. We believe this feeds into the high-quality teaching and learning experience you will receive here. 

At Christ Church our Music and Performing Arts staff are engaged in research across a broad spectrum of activity, among which composition, historical musicology (principally in the baroque and classical eras and in theory, analysis and aesthetics (including a strong emphasis on twentieth- and twenty-first-century art and popular repertoires), and performance. Research is vital to our ethos and is reflected in the fact that, unusually, we have no fewer than four professors on the staff.

On our staff you will find composers whose works have been performed in the UK, Europe, North America, Asia and Australasia by the foremost contemporary music ensembles. Some of our composers work closely with the renowned Sounds New Contemporary Music Festival here in Canterbury, which has attracted regular notice on Radio 3. Among our historical musicologists you will find an internationally-acclaimed Mozart expert, a Czech music specialist, staff who publish on the psychology of music, film music, music aesthetics, music theory and analysis, the author of a brand new standard text on the music of Nikos Skalkottas, and much more besides. Performance research is also central to the department’s work, with experts on performance pedagogy and historical performance practice, whose published outputs include books, articles and CDs. Beyond the traditional landscape of ‘Western Art Music’, we have important practice-as-research work progressing in Drama, Dance, Popular Music and Performing Arts.