The BMus (Hons) degree at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire will help you to realise your potential and prepare you for a career in the music profession, whether that is in performance, composition, or music technology. The programme will develop your specialist musical skills as well as developing your theoretical, historical, and practice-based knowledge, all the while encouraging your individual creativity. As a result, you will become an independent learner, a critical interpreter, and a reflective practitioner. You will have the opportunity to study in one of three Principal Study areas: Performance (Instrumental or Vocal), Composition, Music Technology.

Enhance Employability Skills

All of the UK's Conservatoires aim to do the same thing: to train students for the music profession with the emphasis firmly on your principal study, whether that is in performance, composition or music technology.

As a vocational programme, it is easy to see how all your principal-study work adds to your professional development. Yet Royal Birmingham Conservatoire believes other areas of the course are just as important: the skills in writing, research, communication and critical and reflective thinking that you develop in the academic modules are exactly the types of graduate skills that make you more employable in any area of professional life, musical or otherwise.

Team working and collaborative skills are highly valued in the profession as a whole and are particularly important in any musical context, and you will have opportunities to work as part of team and ensembles across all areas of the course. Equally, you will have opportunities to develop your ability to work under your own direction, whether that is through the individual time spent practising, researching and writing essays and presentations, or working on personal development projects.

The course is designed so that we can guide you through these developments in the early years, give you the ability to reflect on what you have already learned and, most importantly, what you still need to learn. Taking charge of your own development as a musician enables you to work more independently in the later years and provides an employability skill set vital to your continuing professional life.