Songwriting (Distance Learning) MA

This online Songwriting Master's degree teaches creativity, technique, research, and context, to refine your professional song portfolio.

Our distance learning Songwriting Master’s Degree is a world leader in the innovation of teaching and learning songwriting online. The course brings together songwriters from all over the world who wish to study from home. Students have attended the course from Australia, China, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Turkey, the USA and the UK.

The course adopts a blended learning design that combines formal online lectures and instructional videos with regular personal tutorials. Week to week, you study a workbook of specific tasks that are reviewed and discussed with your tutor. Peer-based teaching and learning occurs in our regular Songwriters Circle webinars, in which students from all over the world meet to share and critique their work

From day one you’ll write songs, using alternative strategies designed to work alongside your current creative approaches. Through a range of creative strategies, and critical perspective on your songs’ relationship with audience and industry, you’ll develop and focus your output. This is informed by a blend of practical, theoretical and scholarly practice. Lyric-writing, and a fluent command of imagery, metaphor and narrative is nurtured, as chords and melody take shape around language’s mood and meaning. All the while, you’ll investigate the power and potential of song forms, modes of address, perspectives, time-frames and characters.

Having stretched the range of creative options available to you within your own artistic palette, you’ll turn your hand to research; this is your entry to the postgraduate world. You’ll identify the industrial context relevant to your songs. Your knowledge of your field will become intensified through primary research, secondary research, and contact with guest speakers from industry. Collaborating with songwriters from near and far will increase your creative and networking range; ahead of your Major Project contextual and collaborative research perform the vital tasks of shaping your song outputs.

There’s a broad range of professional outcomes from this course and our graduates now work as: Performers, Lecturers, Researchers, Agents, Signed artists, Signed writers, Teachers, Therapists and Publishers. This course also provides an excellent grounding if you’re interested in going on to PhD study.

We’re looking for the mobile, adaptive creatives of the future. We like you to be engaged with songs and songwriting culture already, and performing artists developing their product are particularly welcome. You’ll possess flair for writing, as well as a good undergraduate degree. However, where an applicant does not have a degree, they are required to complete an Accreditation of Prior Learning Experience (APEL) form.