Musicology postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in musicology settled into something specific during my second year, when a seminar on nineteenth-century concert life sent me to look for local equivalents. I expected to find very little. Instead, in the local studies collection where I now work part-time, I found roughly two decades of printed programmes from a suburban choral society, along with committee minute books that recorded arguments about repertoire, ticket prices and whether to hire professional soloists. That material became my dissertation: a study of how one amateur choir chose what to sing between 1955 and 1975, and what those choices suggest about the musical tastes and social assumptions of its members.

The project taught me more about method than about any single repertory. I built a simple spreadsheet of every work performed, which let me see patterns I would have missed by reading programmes one at a time: a steady diet of Handel and Mendelssohn, a cautious widening towards Britten and Poulenc in the later 1960s, and a conductor's arrival in 1963 that coincided with a sharp rise in unaccompanied Tudor pieces. I had to be careful not to turn coincidence into causation, and my supervisor pushed me hard on that. I also learned that minute books are not transparent windows onto opinion; they are documents written to be read by the committee's successors, and the disagreements they record are the ones someone thought worth recording. Reading Christopher Small's Musicking helped me frame the choir as a set of relationships and activities rather than a producer of performances, though I found myself wanting more of the archival specificity that his argument deliberately sets aside.

Alongside the dissertation I took modules in analysis, source studies and music in Britain since 1900, and I worked on one collaborative project I still think about: with three others, I prepared a performing edition of a short anthem from a manuscript scan, dividing the work between transcription, collation of variants and writing the critical notes. I took the critical notes and the introduction. Coordinating our decisions about editorial policy — how far to modernise accidentals, whether to record obvious copying errors — was slower than doing it alone would have been, but the disagreements exposed choices I had been making without noticing. We submitted the edition and our choir read through it; hearing our decisions sung back was a useful corrective to editing as a purely paper exercise.

My job in the library has shaped my sense of what archives contain and who uses them. I catalogue and retrieve local material, answer enquiries from family historians, and have spent several weeks helping to list an uncatalogued box of parish concert ephemera. Much of this work is routine, but it has made me practical about sources: about how collections are assembled by accident, what gets thrown away, and how a researcher's question can be quietly shaped by what a previous librarian chose to keep. I sing second alto in a community chamber choir and teach beginner piano to two children on Saturday mornings, and both keep me in contact with music as an activity people fit around other obligations, which is broadly what I study.

For postgraduate work I would like to extend my dissertation outwards, comparing two or three amateur societies in different towns over a similar period, and to read more systematically in the historiography of musical life beyond the concert hall. I also want stronger training in palaeography and in handling oral testimony, since former members of these societies are still living and their recollections would need careful, properly critical use. An MA is the right point to build those skills before considering doctoral research.

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