Music Production with Foundation Year, BA

The foundation year covers a range of practical and academic skills which will help prepare you the rest of your undergraduate degree. Some of the modules in the foundation year are focused on music, some will encompass a broader approach.

​Many of the staff and students on this degree are part of a wider community of creative practitioners that includes performers, composers, producers, film makers, game designers, graphic designers, photographers, and dancers; we hope you’ll take advantage of the opportunity to gain inspiration from this diverse group to help expand and enhance your own creative practice. Over the four years of your degree you will work within the studios and labs in our new Creative Arts Building, which takes its name from the trailblazing electronic composer Daphne Oram, a founding member of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop who taught at Canterbury Christ Church University in the 1980s. We hope your time on the course will give you the opportunity to discover new sounds and ideas, develop your technical skills, and form new creative relationships to help you realise your artistic and professional goals.

​ Follow Canterbury Christ Church Music on Instagram @cccu_music.

When you arrive in September there will be a welcome week to help you get up and running before the course starts. You’ll find out about your timetable, get setup with a computing account and gain access to our materials on Blackboard, our online repository of learning materials for your modules. You will also be assigned a Personal Academic Tutor to help you throughout the course.

In the first semester you will attend 2 modules: “Creative Arts and Industries “(Module lead: Emma Graves-Sandriman) and the practical workshops will be led by Dan Herbert in the Daphne Oram Building

The other module will be “The Big Picture” (Module Lead: Simon Prince) and the seminars will be led by Ethan Maltby (Music Lecturer)

Here are the modules you will study this year followed by an overview of your first two modules.

Semester 1 

Creative Arts and Industries

The Big Picture

Semester 2 

Creative Foundations: Performance and Production

The Power of Arts, Humanities and Education
Your Journey to Success
Success Modules – 2 x 15 credits

Creative Arts and Industries

In the first few weeks of this module, you will be introduced to different areas of the creative arts industries and relevant key concepts. Each week, you will take a workshop that focuses on a different area of creative arts, as well as a workshop that is targeted towards your subject area.

Teaching on this module will consist of a mixture of interactive lectures, practical workshops and group/1-1 tutorials with the tutors. You will start the day off with a lecture amongst students from courses across the creative arts subjects where you will learn about the creative arts industries and key concepts within them, get to know staff in the area and hear guest employability talks. After the lecture, you will move into smaller groups for workshops exploring theoretical and practical perspectives related to your own discipline as well as wider creative arts areas. Once you have built up your skills, later workshops will involve you working on a collaborative media project with students from different creative arts courses.

The Big Picture

The Big Picture helps you find your place in university and the wider world. Through lectures, seminars, and guided online learning, you’ll see how university differs from school and workplace training, and how your subject and other ones, too, connect to real issues. The aim is disciplined curiosity and growing confidence across university disciplines.

Lectures are delivered each teaching week to create an event‑style experience for you. Seminars run in subject clusters. The ones after the lectures link the talk to your discipline and move on your assessment preparation. The one-hour seminar is a chance to reflect and seek support as well as work on the assessment.

​​Reading and resource lists will be available on specific module Blackboards, but if you would like to get a head start, you could read Sigthorsson and Davies (2013) Introducing the Creative Industries: from theory to practice.

​A big part of the degree is about exposing you to new sounds, so we suggest you start to focus on listening to a wide range of music, both historical and contemporary, including music from styles with which you are less familiar.

Preparatory exercise (not assessed): Create a playlist (links to streams if possible) of 5 tracks/excerpts of music that represent your inspirations, influences, or interests in music right now. Include a sentence or two for each track explaining why you have included it on your list. In the first few weeks there will be a number of activities for you to get to know the academic team and your fellow students.