Posts Tagged the Beatles

Liverpool Hope University in the United Kingdom is offering courses toward a Masters of Arts degree in the Beatles. According to their website: This MA will examine the significance of the music of the Beatles in the construction of identities, audiences, ethnicities and industries, and localities… This all sounds really cool, but what could you do with a degree like this? The website states that: This MA will be of interest to those working in the fields of popular music studies, cultural studies, social anthropology, politics, gender studies, and musicology, among others.

Currently there are four modules for this program:

Texts and Contexts: Understanding Popular Music
This will offer the student an understanding of how Popular Music Studies has expanded and developed to deal with the changing nature of popular music over the past 50 years. This module will also provide students with contextually related research methods.

Topics in History: Liverpool
This module will introduce and discuss musical production and consumption within the post WWII era and will discuss the roles of locality, economics, space and place, and other issues specifically relating to Merseyside.

Musicology and the Beatles
In this module students will take a popular music semiotics approach and will textually analyse a variety of Beatles material.

Historical and Critical Approaches
Students will be invited to study a more ethnographic approach to the Beatles, the various cultural discourses surrounding their music, and the local tourist industry established in Liverpool to capitalise on the group.

Check out the website for more info on program length, entry criteria, and dissertation information.