Study Music at the Open University

"I'm a qualified yoga instructor, so the idea of combining mindfulness with music felt quite natural to me. I'm now in my second year of a Masters, and it was during my first year that I came across a research paper on meditation and creativity and I just thought, this module [A890 MA in Music, Part 1] was the perfect opportunity to try this for myself.
So I committed to meditating every day for a month and kept track of how it affected my improvising as a woodwind player. It's the sort of project I'd never have imagined doing before joining the OU."

Are you curious about studying music? Explore our courses and free resources via our website.

This week we’re listening to Three Divertimenti by Benjamin Britten.

Originally for string quartet, these 3, single movement character pieces were written when Britten was only 23.

The set is part of the current Cello Classics programme by our partners, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, arranged for four cellos by SCO Principal Cello Philip Higham. Their full programme includes music from Vivaldi, Arensky, Sollima and Menotti.

We’ve chosen the Divertimenti because June is also Pride Month and Britten's story is part of that history. He and his partner, tenor Peter Pears, lived together openly for nearly 40 years at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in the UK (until 1967). When Britten died in 1976, Queen Elizabeth II sent a personal letter of condolence to Pears; widely regarded as the first time the Crown had formally acknowledged a same-sex relationship in this way.

What would you like to listen to next week?

Image attribution:
By Szalay Zoltán - FOTO:Fortepan — ID 137711:, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=189036718

Whatever stage of your musical journey you’re at, our partners Birmingham Contemporary Music Group have something for you this June.

For primary school children:
Music Maze is a free, creative workshop for children aged 7–11 with no musical experience needed, just a love of sound and fun.
📅 7 June, 10am · Birmingham

For secondary school students:
The Creative Composing Lab is a full day spent composing for BCMG’s professional musicians, guided by composer David Horne. An unmissable opportunity for young musicians aged 14–18.
📅 28 June, 10am · Birmingham

For our students 🎓
Did you know that studying music with us gives you access to exclusive in-person study days with BCMG in Birmingham? Whether you’re at undergraduate, postgraduate or PhD level, our partnership brings you face to face with some of the world’s leading contemporary musicians and composers.

Music education matters at every level and partnerships like this one are how we make it happen.

Good luck to everyone who sat their GCSE Music exam today. We're rooting for you!

It's a bittersweet day. While entries are slowly recovering, GCSE Music numbers remain at historically low levels; down 25% since 2010, largely due to the EBacc squeezing the arts out of the curriculum. And almost half of schools didn't enter a single pupil for GCSE Music last year.

No GCSE doesn't mean the end of music study though: you don't need a GCSE in Music to study it at degree level with us.

Our BMus is open to students who demonstrate passion and musical ability, whatever your academic background. If music is your thing, there may well be a path forward.

Find out more about studying music with us on the OU website.

We tend to listen to music as if it exists in its own world. But it never really does.

This week we’re listening to Vivaldi, The Four Seasons as performed by La Serenissima, on their brand new recording, which was just picked by BBC Radio 3 's Building a Library as the one to own.

The Four Seasons is the perfect piece to begin thinking about music in conversation with the other arts. Each concerto comes with its own sonnet (poetry Vivaldi wrote himself) describing what the music depicts: a shepherd drowsing in the summer heat, a winter walk on frozen ground, birds heralding spring. Literal sonic representations of nature and farming through the year.

But that’s only one interpretation.

The seasons were one of the great subjects of Baroque visual art; you probably recognise Arcimboldo's extraordinary portraits, where summer and winter are rendered as human faces composed entirely of fruit, vegetables, and bare branches even if you didn’t know his name. They aren’t just about fruit; they are about life and death.

Music, poetry, painting; all three arts circling the same subject matter, each doing something the others can't, each exploring the literal and the allegory.

That intersection is exactly what the Open University's BA in Music begins. The first module, Discovering the Arts and Humanities (A111), spans art history, English, music and more; exploring how each subject area is connected, and asking what we gain from studying them together.

What would you like to listen to next week?

Are you dreaming of studying music at Masters level but worried about the cost?

The Margaret Wooder Studentships could cover your full tuition fees for our MA Music programme.

✅ Part One fees fully funded
✅ Part Two fees funded on passing Part One at merit or distinction level

To apply, send the following to [email protected] by 30 June 2026:
• Completed application form (https://fass.open.ac.uk/music/ma/studentships)
• CV of no more than two pages
• Latest degree certificate or transcript

⚠️ Please do not register for the MA until you’ve been notified of the outcome of your application. Studentships are not available to those in receipt of full funding from another funding body.

💬 Got questions? Reach out informally to our Head of Discipline: Dr Naomi Barker.

📅 Deadline: 30 June 2026. Don’t miss out!

P.S. Screenshot this post to make the links clickable from your camera roll.

This week we're inviting you to notice how music lives in time with Beethoven, Grosse Fuge, Op. 133 (1825).

When it premiered, critics called it "incomprehensible". Today it's considered one of his greatest achievements. Stravinsky called it "an absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever."

The invitation this week isn't to understand it. It's to feel it: specifically, to notice how it plays with your sense of time.

Every piece of music has a pulse (its underlying heartbeat), a tempo (how fast or slow), a metre (how that time is organised into patterns), and rhythm (the play of long and short sounds across all of it). The Grosse Fuge does something extraordinary with all four.

If you want a framework for what you're hearing, the Open University has a free course called Discovering Music Through Listening, and week one is all about musical time: pulse, tempo, metre, rhythm.

No notation, no prior knowledge needed.

This week's listen: It's Only a Paper Moon, as performed by Nat King Cole. Although you might be more familiar with Ella Fitz Gerald’s rendition because it was used in the 1990s for a Galaxy chocolate advert!

This song had been kicking around for over a decade before it became famous. Written for a flop Broadway play in 1932, it only found its lasting audience during the final years of World War II.

Whichever is your favourite there's an ease to this song that disguises how carefully constructed the whole thing is. While you’re listening with us, notice where the sections repeat, where something shifts, where the music and the lyric are doing the same thing.

If you want to go deeper, the Open University has a free course called ‘Listening for Form in Popular Music’, and Nat King Cole’s recording is one of the songs we use as a case study. No musical knowledge needed. Just ears and curiosity.

Link in the comments 🔗

What should we listen to next?

OU Music, University Music Bournemouth and The Thomas Hardy Society are holding a study day on Words, Music & Place on 26 June at Bournemouth University. Full details are at https://university.open.ac.uk/arts/research/literature-and-music/events/study-day-words-music-and-place and a link for registration is in the comments.