Overview

Visiting Students are offered selected core topics in music analysis, music history, theory and philosophy, performance and compositional techniques. Across all courses we encourage students to engage critically and creatively with a wide range of music(s) and critical issues. How, for example, might we interpret music in relation to broader aesthetic and cultural-historical trends? What does music tell us about the context in which it was conceived? And how might we engage with music as a lens through which to understand the human condition? In addressing these questions, our approach is guided by a desire to challenge received ideas about music history and to open up wider discussion about neglected figures, musical cultures, and repertoires. 

Further details of the vibrant musical scene at LMH, both academically and in terms of performance opportunities, can be found here. 

Tutorials in Music

Tutorials can be offered in any of these topics, in any term and any year:

Philosophy of Music

  • Musical Thought and Scholarship
  • Foundations in the Study of Music

Music Theory

  • Musical Analysis and Criticism 

Composition

  • Stylistic Composition
  • Composition Portfolio
  • Musical Arranging

Performance

  • Keyboard Skills
  • Conducting Skillls

Topics II

  • Vernacular Song in the Long 13th Century 
  • Polyphony and Polemic in a Fractured Europe, c. 1500–1650 
  • 18th-Century Opera
  • The Renaissance Madrigal

Topics III

  • The String Quartet Between Classicism & Modernism
  • World Jazz
  • Women in Popular Music 
  • Music, Technology, and Worldmaking in the Nineteenth Century
  • History of Electronic Music
  • African Jazz Perspectives

List C (special offering for LMH Visiting Students only)

  • Mediating Intimacy: Space and Intersubjectivity in Recorded Music and Sound
  • Musical Instruments and Organology
  • The History and Practice of English Folk Music
  • Music in Eighteenth-Century Oxford
  • Sound and Space
  • Music, Environment, and Natureculture
  • Musical Instruments and Organology: The study of musical instruments has developed massively in the twentieth century. This practical course incorporates museum-based tasks as well as setting essays based on key texts and key people in the history of the field. We will ask questions like: is it better to play these instruments or preserve them? How has the study of musical instruments changed since the birth of organology in the early twentieth century? How do electronic (and other sorts of) instruments fit the bigger picture?
  • Music of the People: Folk, traditional and vernacular music through history and geography.  How do we define folk music and what is the difference between this and popular/national/traditional music? This course begins with an overview of the history of English folk music and opens the topic of what separates one music from the musics of other nations, with key examples from Ireland, Scotland and America. We will look at case studies of particular musicians and music collectors, and ask why the notion of folk song/music has captivated the imaginations over so many generations in so many countries around the world.
  • Music in Enlightenment Oxford: The Eighteenth-Century was a time of flourishing for music in Oxford, as elsewhere, with musicians for the first time allowed to work ‘freelance’. We will study some key musical figures in the University and city, looking at the history of what they did and the impact it has had, incorporating the founding of the Oxford Music Room and history of performance there (this is not a music theory or analysis course, we will listen to music but focusing on the history and context).

Courses in Music

The following courses are offered through lectures (not tutorials) in different terms every year; and some are offered in alternating years. Subject to availability.  

Examples of lecture courses running in 2025–26: 

  • Musical Thought and Scholarship
  • Musical Analysis and Criticism
  • Music in the Community
  • Music and Philosophy: The Case of Wagner
  • The String Quartet Between Classicism & Modernism
  • Women in Popular Music  

Advice on written work to be submitted

Two pieces of written work should be submitted with your application.  Essay work should be presented to a high standard of literacy and of scholarly quality. Compositional work should be presented to professional standards of musical literacy and high level of technical competence.   

Tutors

Prof Gascia Ouzounian (Fellow and Associate Professor of Music) - on research leave until the end of 2025

Dr Jacob Downs (Tutor and Departmental Lecturer in Music)

Dr Jonathan Packham (Stipendiary Lecturer in Music)

Dr Alice Little is a professional researcher in music, history, and the history of collecting, as well as an author of fiction