Creative Arts and Music

Creative arts and music is a degree that places practice and cultural understanding side by side, asking both how creative work is made and what it means within the societies and traditions from which it emerges. Creative arts is a broad field encompassing visual art, performance, film, design, and digital media, all concerned with making work that has aesthetic and communicative power. Music, studied academically and practically, adds the world's most universal art form, engaging with the history of musical traditions, the analysis of musical form, and the critical understanding of how music functions in different cultures and contexts.

At the School of Oriental and African Studies, this three-year, full-time programme includes a foundation year and brings SOAS's distinctive global perspective to both creative arts and music. You will encounter artistic and musical traditions from across the world, including many that are rarely taught in UK arts and music programmes, developing a genuinely cross-cultural understanding of creative practice and its social and political dimensions. The combination is intellectually wide-ranging and allows you to develop both practical creative skills and the critical frameworks needed to situate creative work in its cultural contexts.

Graduates go on to careers in arts organisations, galleries, museums, music management, cultural policy, education, arts journalism, broadcasting, and international cultural exchange. SOAS's global orientation makes graduates particularly well-suited to roles in international cultural organisations and in contexts where cross-cultural understanding of the arts is directly relevant. Many graduates continue to postgraduate study in music, fine art, cultural management, or ethnomusicology.