Music: Sustaining Your Practice

Have you ever wondered how to make the first step from being a music student to launching a career as a professional musician, or how to gain the skills that will help your creative practice to flourish after graduation? The final course in OCA’s music degree, launched in September, does exactly that. 

Sustaining Your Practice is an opportunity for you to develop professional networks, learn about the business side of a music career, and to present your creative work to the public with support from a one-to-one tutor. 

There’s plenty of flexibility within the course, allowing you to devise an individual project which is appropriate to your individual circumstances, your post-degree aims and the needs of your specific creative practice. Concerts, websites, livestreams, podcasts, lecture recitals, published articles, community events, recordings…these are just some examples of the possible ways of reaching an audience that you may like to explore.

While presenting work to a public audience can feel like a daunting step, the course structure enables you to work through a series of exercises and tasks to gain confidence and broaden awareness of professional practices. Tutor support takes place mostly through online video meetings, discussing and refining plans as they develop and allowing you to draw upon your tutor’s experience of organising similar events, building networks and sustaining a practical musical career. Peer support is also available through regular Level 3 zoom meetings and the music department forum space. 

The first students are well underway with their projects, with Emma Arandjelović’s Notes from Home concert due to take place in Dundee on 4th December. The course has started off well, and I’m excited to see what projects our industrious music students come up with next!

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash