Reflections…

Hi! My name’s Eve, I’m in my third and final year here at City Uni. I’m on the BMus music degree and hopefully through this blog you guys can get a real idea of what life at City’s like, what we get up to in music and what it’s like to be a student here in the heart of London!

As 2015 gets underway and I’ve met my last few deadlines for term one, it gives me a chance to look back at last year. There was so much going on at the end of term! We just finished up a bunch of modules. For one of them, Popular Music Now, part of our assessment was to give presentations on a current issue in the popular music industry. Each person had to think of a topic themselves that they wanted to do. Their were some really interesting ones like: Does The X-Factor promote real talent, or is it merely public entertainment? Are digital releases destroying the physical album? Is accessible technology integral to the survival of underground hip hop in the UK? and YouTube and the ‘illegal’ music download. This is just one of the huge range of modules we can take. This term there are loads of different modules being offered like: ‘Music, Fascism and Communism’, ‘Music Therapy’, ‘Music Traditions of the Far East’, ‘Sound Art and Technoculture’ to name a few!

We also have loads of different ensembles that run throughout our year and at the end of last term we had our Christmas Concert for choir. I have been taking part in choir since my second year at City and I really enjoy it. It’s a nice group of girls and guys and we do a variety of music each term. For the concert we sang a range of pieces everything from Bruckner Motets to Purcell Funeral Music for Queen Mary, as well as plenty of traditional Christmas Carols! We sang in St Clement’s Church where we’ve sung before. It’s a lovely old church with really great acoustics and it’s just down the road from uni. See a clip of the concert.

Just before we broke up in December, we had the Music Department’s Christmas Cabaret (an annual event organized by the staff and students). It’s on the last day of term and all of the students get together with our lecturers for food and drink and a range of musical acts. We had everything from a few songs from our lecturers, some Hawaiian Christmas songs on the ukulele and even a staff against student rap battle! We also had our student vs staff annual quiz! It’s a really fun way to end the term. We all had really good fun and it was a great way for first, second and third years to all hang out together and wind down after a busy term!