Professional Practice 2B

The further development of musicianship skills necessary to enter a career in the popular music industry, particularly as a studio musician.

MUSI 256 extends performance and improvisational skills in the study of jazz, jazz fusion, music theatre and other contemporary performance styles for those students intending to enter and maintain careers as freelance musicians. This paper further develops technical foundations established in MUSI 146 and MUSI 156, and it is designed to broaden playing skills in diverse musical contexts. In order to maintain career longevity, it is often necessary to be adaptable to the demands of work situations that require you to be musically flexible. This most often requires a great deal of analytical listening to a selection of music from the musical style in question. Critical listening is, therefore, essential, and if a style is unfamiliar, you will be required to immerse yourself in the existing catalogue of recorded works that are available. In the second half of the second semester, students will form bands to create a repertoire of original material for assessed live performance.

Learning Outcomes
The goals of this paper are

• To further develop a firm technical foundation on your instrument
• To study a balanced repertoire drawn from jazz, jazz fusion, music theatre and other contemporary performance styles in line with the level-2 syllabus, assimilating and solving interpretative issues with increasing independence
• To develop appropriate presentation skills to perform the set repertoire
• To further expand performance skills in a variety of modern playing styles
• To enable the critical evaluation of time-management skills in the context of independent practice with increasing competence and confidence