Scottish Music

The MMus (Scottish Music) programme is the world’s leading postgraduate degree course in traditional Scottish music. The programme offers advanced training to talented traditional musicians from a diverse range of undergraduate degrees or their equivalent, allowing them to develop their skills on their main instruments in the contexts of practical and academic studies and enabling them to pursue a variety of careers or further research to PhD level. Piping tuition on the MMus is delivered in collaboration with the National Piping Centre, which is internationally recognised as a centre of excellence in Highland Bagpipe teaching.
 

With opportunities for outreach work and tours both within Scotland and abroad, the programme offers a unique training for individuals wanting to make a career in traditional music. Students concentrate on developing their performance skills on their principal study, and spend time informing and supporting their study with a wide and diverse range of elective classes and vocational experiences, including recording and producing, arts management and practice-based research methodology.
 

Principal studies include accordion, Highland bagpipe (taught in collaboration with the National Piping Centre, Glasgow), guitar, Scottish harp, fiddle, flute (Boehmar or simple system), percussion and singing (Scots and/or Gaelic). All students receive a minimum of a 90 minute lesson per week and can also opt to study other instruments in addition to many other contextual subjects, including session or band work, Gaelic and Scots languages, historical and analytical studies and many more. MMus (Scottish Music) students may exit the degree after the first year with a Postgraduate Diploma, or may  complete the full MMus degree in one year through an intensive route.
 

Head of Department:  Dr Joshua Dickson
Email: j.dickson@rcs.ac.uk