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

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