Arts and Culture: Music Studies

The one-year Master's programme Music Studies enables you to specialise in historical, cultural or cognitive musicology, or a combination of the three. The University of Amsterdam offers a rich combination of musicological approaches with strong links to other scholarly disciplines. Functioning within the realm of the humanities, the sciences and the social sciences, the Master's in Music Studies highlights the multifaceted ways in which music can be perceived and understood, cherishing the manifold historical, cultural and cognitive musical experiences that staff and students bring with them from many different parts of the world.
The Master's in Music Studies is unique in enabling its students to familiarise themselves with historiography, cognitive science, postcolonial theory, computation, ethnography, or philosophy, and relate or combine these intellectual frameworks in their studies of music. The academic staff's research areas encompass a wide range of musics of the world, including musical traditions from the Middle East, European and North American art music traditions of the past two centuries, South African music, Indonesian music, and jazz worldwide.