Music postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

At a Tuesday rehearsal of the community choir I accompany, the altos kept drifting flat at the same bar of a Victorian anthem. It was not a hard passage to sing. The composer had moved to the relative minor through a chromatic inner part, and the altos, who mostly learn by ear, were hearing the old key a beat longer than the harmony allowed. I played their line alone, then with the bass beneath it, and by the third attempt it held. Moments like that, where a question about harmony turns out to be a question about how ordinary singers hear, are the reason I want to undertake postgraduate study in music.

My undergraduate degree gave me a broad grounding in analysis, history and keyboard skills, but the work I found most absorbing was close study of functional repertoire. For my final-year project I examined the harmonisations in a nineteenth-century parish tune book held by the church where I had played as a teenager. I transcribed forty tunes, compared them with versions in later hymnals, and prepared a small performing edition of eight. The project taught me practical disciplines: deciding how to treat inconsistent accidentals, recording each editorial choice so a reader could reverse it, and checking my readings at the keyboard rather than trusting the page. I also noticed that later editors often smoothed out parallel motion and unusual doublings which the earlier book seemed to accept. I could describe that pattern but not yet explain it, and I would like to investigate whether such changes reflect shifting teaching of harmony, changes in congregational practice, or simply the habits of particular editors.

Reading has helped me frame that question. Nicholas Temperley's work on parish church music in England showed me how much the sound of worship depended on local circumstance rather than published ideals, and it made me more cautious about treating any single printed version as authoritative. I have also been working through counterpoint exercises on my own, partly to sharpen my ear for the voice-leading choices I see in the sources.

Outside university, I have accompanied the choir for two years. There are about thirty members, few of whom read music fluently, so I prepare rehearsal tracks for each voice part and have learned to simplify accompaniments without losing the harmonic shape. When our director was unwell for a month, I led warm-ups and sectional rehearsals. That was a modest responsibility, but it showed me how analysis becomes useful only when it can be explained quickly and kindly to people who have come to enjoy themselves after work.

Since graduating I have worked night shifts stocking shelves at a supermarket. The work is physical and repetitive, and it has made me organised about protecting time for practice and reading during the day. It has also given me colleagues whose musical lives are nothing like mine; conversations during breaks about what people actually listen to have made me less inclined to assume what counts as serious music. On days off I cycle long distances, which is where I tend to work through problems I have been stuck on.

At postgraduate level I hope to develop a focused research project on the editing and performance of congregational music, combining archival work with attention to how such music is sung now. I would like stronger training in research methods, source criticism and writing at length, and the chance to test my ideas against people who know far more than I do. I bring careful editorial habits, practical experience of making music with non-specialists, and the patience to stay with a small question until it yields something worth saying. I am ready to commit that steadily to advanced study.