Bachelor of Arts (Music)

Minimum Grade H5 in two subjects and passes in four other subjects at O6/H7 Level in the Leaving Certificate, including Irish, English, another language, and three other subjects recognised for entry purposes. Leaving Cert Music is recommended, but not essential.

Dr Aidan Thomson is Head of Music and Senior Lecturer at the University of Galway.

Dr Thomson is a musicologist with a particular interest in British and Irish music of the early twentieth century, particularly Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arnold Bax and the ‘Celtic North’. He is also an experienced violinist (having led the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland while at university), pianist and organist.

Dr Thomson co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams (Cambridge University Press, 2013). In 2016, he wrote and presented ‘Bax, Ireland and 1916’ for RTÉ Lyric FM’s ‘Lyric Feature’ programme, which looked at Bax’s relationship with the leaders of the Easter Rising. As part of the centenary celebrations, he also gave a public lecture in Dublin about Bax’s friendship with Pádraig Pearse.

Before coming to the University of Galway,  Dr Thomson was Lecturer in Music at Queen’s University Belfast, where he taught music history, theory and analysis, and some performance. He has also taught at the universities of Oxford and Leeds.

Dr Amanda Feery

Dr Amanda Feery has been appointed as the new Lecturer in Composition with the Department of Music at the University of Galway.  Amanda Feery is a composer working with acoustic, electronic, and improvised music, having written for chamber and vocal ensembles, film, theatre, installation, and multimedia. 

Graduating from Trinity College Dublin with a degree in Music in 2006, she continued her studies in Music and Media Technologies at Trinity College Dublin, completing an M.Phil in 2009. Amanda was the Mark Nelson Fellow in Music at Princeton University, completing her PhD in Music Composition in 2019. Her research focused on Kate Bush’s song suite, The Ninth Wave.

Her work has featured at New Music Dublin, First Fortnight Festival and Dublin Fringe Festival, among others, and she has been composer-in-residence at Bang on a Can Summer Festival, SOUNDscape and Greywood Arts. Her 2019 residency at Centre Cultural Irlandais focused on recording piano improvisations on public pianos in Paris.

Music graduates typically go on to careers in such fields as performance, teaching, composition, academia, sound engineering, music therapy, arts administration, journalism, broadcasting, publishing, librarianship and archivism. In some cases, this may require a further vocational qualification or postgraduate study. 

The BA Arts Music programme has been designed to meet the requirement of the Irish Teaching Council, so graduates will be qualified to use music as a teaching subject as part of their study for a postgraduate degree in post-primary education. 

Students will also have opportunities to avail of at the University of Galway are unique offerings in creative arts management and business, ensuring they have real-world skills that will be directly relevant to the creative arts industry in Ireland and internationally. 

Music BA graduates have transferable skills in such areas as public presentations, teamwork, research, and written and verbal communication. These skills are highly attractive to employers in a wide range of fields beyond music.  

Students can combine the study of music with subjects such as Psychology, Legal Studies, Information Technology or Languages, all of which open up career opportunities in those areas. 

In the third year of the programme, most students spend a semester either studying abroad at an international university or on a placement with an Irish arts, media or educational organisation. The university has partnerships with Galway Music Residency and Music for Galway; students may take placements with such organisations in the areas like marketing, production, administration or other areas relevant to their course. Students taking a language must spend a semester abroad studying in a country where that language is spoken, such as University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France; University of Bologna, Italy or Oviedo in Spain. There are also international links with American universities where students can study Music and other performing arts subjects such as Notre Dame University in Indiana, USA. 

EU Fees are comprised of Tuition + Student Contribution Charge + Student Levy** €140.  **Payable by all students and is not covered by SUSI.  Further detail here.

• URL for School webpage: https://www.universityofgalway.ie/colleges-and-schools/arts-social-sciences-and-celtic-studies/english-creative-arts/
• URL for College webpage: https://www.universityofgalway.ie/arts/
• URL for Music Webpage: https://www.universityofgalway.ie/colleges-and-schools/arts-social-sciences-and-celtic-studies/english-creative-arts/departments-centres/music/