This programme will support you to develop your performance skills in your own current, chosen style(s) of music, while offering you the opportunity to explore and play a wide range of global musics. You will also develop your scholarly and theoretical knowledge of music. In order to offer new insights into the world of music and enhance your creative potential, you will be introduced to a wide range of performance practices and scholarly traditions. You will also study a number of vocational modules that will support you in your development of a fulfilling career.
As a student, you will be based at the world-class Irish World Academy, with its cutting-edge performance and rehearsal spaces, and state-of-the-art technological infrastructure. The co-operative education period (Year 3, Semester 1) allows you to construct your own work-experience, providing valuable experience of the opportunities open to you when you graduate. The programme prepares you for many different career paths in areas including professional performance, composition, academia, arts curation and management, media, archive work, music production, and combinations of these.
This course also has an alternative entry route via the Certificate in Music and Dance. Students apply directly to University of Limerick. Students who successfully complete the one-year certificate have the opportunity to join year two of the degree programme.
Throughout the four years of the programme, you will develop your performance skills by taking individual lessons on your own instrument (or voice), and you will also receive individual lessons on a choice of world music instruments, such as the North Indian plucked stringed instrument sarode, the West African djembe drum and the Javanese two-stringed bowed fiddle rebab.
Group-playing is a core aspect of the BA World Music. Throughout the four years of the programme you will participate in a wide range of ensembles, including Javanese Gamelan from Indonesia, Middle Eastern and Balkan Music, Ewe Drumming from Ghana, World Popular Music Ensemble and West African Drumming. You will also have the opportunity to choose to participate in performance classes in the areas of Irish traditional music and dance, voice studies and contemporary dance.
You will be introduced to the academic study of a wide range of world musics, as well as classical music, popular music and traditional musics. Specialist modules for BA World Music students include Global Pop Music, Ethnomusicology and World Music Survey. You will also study a wide range of music theory related to classical and popular music, Indian and Middle Eastern music, and more.
In addition to your core modules, over the four years of the programme, BA World Music students join students studying on the voice, dance and Irish traditional music programmes to take a range of modules in arts-related technology, professional and research skills, education and the role of arts in health and wellbeing. Every semester, you will also have the opportunity to choose elective modules from a broad of range of options, covering history, languages, sociology, performance practice, choreography, composition etc.
