The Contemporary Performance Department of the Australian Institute of Music is focused on educating, nurturing and inspiring musical careers. The courses are highly practical and designed to give students numerous performance and recording opportunities. The teaching staff is made up of highly respected industry professionals who are passionate about developing the industry’s next generation.

Bachelor of Music 

The Bachelor is our most popular course, offering students a rich diversity of performance and theoretical experiences and helping students develop their skills as performing musicians.

Major Study

Major Study involves a weekly one hour individual lesson and a two hour masterclass which is divided by instrumental groupings: Guitar, Keyboard, Woodwind, Brass, Vocal, Bass, Drums and Percussion.

Performance Studies:

Performance Studies contains two units – Performance Studies and Concert Practice. Concert Practice runs for 2 hours weekly and is run in a formal setting reflecting work being undertaken in Performance Studies class, Major Study class and Ensemble. Performance Studies investigates specific genres of music and provides students a rich collection of styles from which to push their performance skills.

Unit 1: Overview of Contemporary Performance
Unit 2: Rhythm and Blues
Unit 3: Early Jazz to 1950’s
Unit 4: Australian Contemporary Music
Unit 5: World Music
Unit 6: Modern Jazz post 1950 

Ensemble:

The core performance opportunity at the Institute is the ensemble, in which students are given the opportunity to develop their individual and collective skills . This is an exciting and challenging weekly class with rehearsals, to develop a 20 minute set per semester for public performance. Ensembles typically contains a line up of bass, drums/percussion, guitar, voice, keyboard and woodwind/brass.

Foundation and Critical Studies:

All students undertake academic studies at the Australian Institute of Music. These units are comprised of Foundation Studies in theory, history and aural, and Critical Studies that provide an in-depth study or major musical periods and styles.

Students can elect to study a range of subjects to suit their personal interests and shape their career path – these subjects include Audio, Music Theatre, Film Music, World Music and follow classical history and theory as part of their Critical Studies.

Associated Studies:

Associated Studies are elective units that supplement the education of the Contemporary student at the Australian Institute of Music. Students elect two Associated Studies every semester. Popular Associated Studies include Digital Technology, Keyboard Skills, Guitar Skills, Songwriting, Arranging and Arts/Law

Core Studies:

Ensemble - Through a range of instrument combinations and music styles including rock, blues, jazz, swing, reggae, and Latin, students develop skills in improvisation, transcription, transposition, interpretation, notation, band leading, accompaniment and rehearsal techniques.

Music History - Students undertake a two-trimester overview of the development of the history of music in Western civilisation from the beginning of Christianity to the present day. Attention is then given to the contribution of music to the total dramatic entity that is opera over its 400-year history and to the 100 years of film. Students also examine and compare various significant aspects of 20th-century music drawn from both the ‘classical’ and ‘contemporary’ streams. In the final trimester, classical students will study chamber music from its beginning to the present day, while contemporary students examine the styles, performers and composers in 20th-century popular music.

Theory - Students undertake a comprehensive grounding through the revision of basic principles and an introduction of the main elements of classical and contemporary music theory. This includes: modes, voice leading, jazz chords, inversions, guide tones, pentatonic and blues scales, chordal pluralities, and dominant 7th and extended chords. Further studies are done in more developed aspects of classical theory, including: harmonisation, two-part inventions, chromaticism, tonicisation, chordal techniques, non-functional harmony and atonal music. 

Aural - Students develop the aural skills essential for professional musicians based on a program of rhythm, interval, melodic, tetrachord and 12-tone row dictation; chord, scale and mode recognition; and the development of relative pitch. 

Research - Students are introduced to the processes of research methodology and, through individual research purposes, identify techniques and procedures used to investigate and document strategies, and provide information relevant to the presentation of a research paper.

Undergraduate Awards:
Diploma of Music
Advanced Diploma of Music
Bachelor of Music
Bachelor of Music, Honours

Post Graduate Awards:
Graduate Certificate of Music
Graduate Diploma of Music
Master of Music

Instruments Available in the Contemporary Department:

Vocal, Guitar, Bass, Drum, Keyboard, Percussion, Saxaphone, Brass, Woodwind and Strings.