Our Integrated Foundation Year for Arts and Humanities will take you through a carefully-designed course to help you to progress confidently onto your undergraduate degree.

Arts and Humanities subjects, like Music, provide key ways of understanding our complex world, its histories, and current debates facing contemporary society. Identity, political and social conflict, our interaction with new digital and genetic technologies, our stewardship of the environment are all issues where the voice of creative and critical thinking are key. Literary texts, films, plays and digital games offer important ways in which societies have debated - and continue to represent - their values and their futures.

The Foundation Year provides progressive structures in which you are able to gain knowledge and understanding of approaches to humanities study and your chosen degree subject. All Foundation Year students take ‘Global Perspectives’, then four subject-based courses provide approaches to the study of arts and humanities subjects, giving you critical skills to explore a range of literary, visual, and cultural forms, including plays, films, and digital media.

Once you have completed your Foundation year, you will normally progress onto the full degree course, BMus Music. There may also be flexibility to move onto a degree in another department (see end of section, below).

BMus Music at Royal Holloway is a flexible degree, allowing you to tailor your degree to your own interests and passions.

We have expertise spanning traditional, modern and world music. Through studying musical texts, practices, cultures and institutions you will explore issues in history, sociology, ethnology, and philosophy covering an exceptional geographical and chronological range. You will also be able to gain practical skills in composition, music technology and performance.

You will join a music department that is among the very best in the country, ranked third in the UK for research quality (REF 2014) and the only music department in the country to hold a prestigious Regius Professorship. Our well-connected department means you have the opportunity to make valuable music industry contacts. Our staff are connected with musical networks such as Wigmore Hall, the BBC Proms, Royal Opera House.

- Choose from a wide range of performance opportunities including orchestras, choirs, jazz, pop, and world music ensembles.

- Learn from academics whose expertise spans music from the Middle Ages to the present and around the globe.

- Gain practical skills in composition, music technology or performance.

- Receive excellent tuition on your first instrument (or voice) at no extra cost to you.

- Apply for one of our choral, organ, orchestral or music scholarships.

- You will have access to our well-equipped studios, recording facilities, and incredible performance spaces, including the Windsor Auditorium, Boilerhouse Theatre, Victorian Picture Gallery and College Chapel.

- Work with professional conductors and receive coaching from leading professional groups such as the King's Singers and the London Mozart Players.

Please note: On successful completion of your Foundation Year, you may be able to choose an alternative pathway which could include a Single Honours, joint or minor degree within Music, or degrees within the Humanities (Classics, Drama, History, English (except pathways with Creative Writing), Philosophy, Comparative Literature and Culture, Liberal Arts). If you'd like to do this, you may take your Foundation Year Department Based Project in one of the other departments in Humanities.

From time to time, we make changes to our courses to improve the student and learning experience, and this is particularly the case as we continue to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic. If we make a significant change to your chosen course, we’ll let you know as soon as we can.