Screen-Music pedagogies study day

Annette Davison and Chris Letcher: Squaring the Circle of Scaling Up: Content and Assessment in an Expanding Screen Music Course 

In this paper Chris Letcher and Annette Davison discuss the development of Music on Screen, a postgraduate course first delivered over a decade ago. The assessment methods were designed to help students — most of whom have not previously studied films or film scoring — develop new skills, not only in writing about music for screen, but engaging hands-on with audiovisual media through the creation of video essays. Cohort demographics have shifted significantly over the years: the course is no longer available to students from other schools, and the proportion of non-native English students has risen sharply. On the positive side, the course now incorporates more global perspectives by moving beyond Euro-American texts and approaches, and course enrolment has increased dramatically; numbers have almost tripled. There is a(n institutional) desire to grow course numbers further. 

The course assessment design has thus far withstood (and has arguably been validated by) these developments, but it is not without its problems. In this presentation, Chris and Annette provide a critical reflection on the “scaleability” of resource-intensive course assessment models, which require access to hardware, software, skirting copyright encryption systems, and more mundane hurdles like securing adequate screening space. This year, the programme’s external examiner suggested that the course may be over-assessed, questioning the necessity for students to submit an analysis of a film sequence early in the course.

In this paper Chris and Annette float possible solutions to these challenges that will preserve the opportunities the course (potentially!) affords. 

Bios

Chris Letcher is a film composer, songwriter and senior lecturer in screen music composition at the University of Edinburgh. He has recently composed a score for the feature film Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (Sony Pictures Classics; 2025). He has published on issues of process in screen music creation and on musical representation in African cinema in Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, Journal of Film Music, and Ethnomusicology Forum. He has a chapter on Cristóbal Tapia de Veer’s score for The White Lotus (2021-2025) in the forthcoming Sonic Production Practices in Contemporary Film, TV and Short-Form Media.

Annette Davison holds a Personal Chair in Music and Audiovisual Media at the University of Edinburgh. She has published research on a wide range of topics ranging from the sonic practices of silent cinema in Britain, to the sound worlds of David Lynch, stage and screen productions of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, and about the title and end-credit sequences of television series. Following studies of films produced by the Shell Film Unit, her current research focuses on the changing representations of the oil industry in mainstream film and television.

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Mykaell Riley and Hussein Boon: Devising an Authentic Undergraduate Module for Screen Music Centred on African Diasporic Music: Insights from the BBC Television Programme 'Boarders'

This presentation showcases follow-up work demonstrating a valuable advancement in screen media education. The main focus is our collaboration on the BBC TV series Boarders, produced by Studio Lambert and All3Media. This innovative partnership, developed by the BMRU, connects business, students, alumni, and academia. Boarders has gained popularity with UK audiences, BBC1 and iPlayer, and has secured international distribution with US broadcaster Tubi. 

For this presentation, we will outline the development of a new module aligned with a focus on African Diasporic music and music makers in keeping with the show. The BMRU were able to validate a level 6 undergraduate module as a means of bringing the external working context into the academic domain. This meant that students working on future series and enrolled on the module would receive credits for their work on the show. All students taking the module, whether submitting work for the show or not, would receive briefings in real-time and make adaptations of their work based on feedback from the production team. 

Notable points include student IMDb production credits, an OST album scheduled for release by Warner Music and the development of promotional and social media materials that foreground student composers working on the series.

The presentation discusses the strategic thinking behind this innovative project and aspects that could be replicated in the academic and business fields.

Bios

Mykaell Riley is Reader/Associate Professor, Director of The Black Music Research Unit (BMRU) and Principal Investigator for the Bass Culture project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. His career started as a founder member of the band Steel Pulse. Over the years he has performed, produced, managed and consulted on many successful artists and their projects. As a professional writer / producer, Mykaell’s work has encompassed TV, Film and Theatre, resulting in over eleven UK top twenty positions, and three UK number ones. The Bass Culture project investigated the impact of Jamaican music in Britain. Its exhibition, Bass Culture Expo 70/50, was the UK’s largest ever Jamaican music exhibition, which highlighted the Windrush generation’s impact on Britain, and featured the largest collection of images linking the Windrush generation to grime. His work on the Ticketmaster Grime Report (2017) help change government legislation. 

Hussein Boon is Principal Lecturer and member of the Black Music Research Unit at the University of Westminster. His teaching and areas of research interest are music production, performance technologies, songwriting, modular synthesis, live coding, music business and AI. He helped to establish Rockschool popular music exams and has worked for artists such as Beats International, Alex Parks, Microgroove and De La Soul. His recent publications include short stories about AI and music, and writing on shift registers for semi-improvised songwriting and composition, and reimagining the digital audio workstation as a design tool. 

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Toby Huelin: Screen Music in English Secondary School Curricula: an Exploratory Content Analysis

This paper examines the presence of screen music in the curricula of English secondary schools. Specifically, it assesses the content of the GCSE and A Level qualifications offered by the four exam boards available for study in England (AQA, Edexcel, Eduqas, and OCR) and reveals where and how screen music forms part of these qualifications. Importantly, the study focuses not only on Music, but also incorporates discussion of related subjects where screen music features, namely Film Studies, Media Studies, and Music Technology. In doing so, the paper provides the first study to map the availability of screen music as a curriculum area in upper-level secondary education and provides a foundation for future work exploring the place of screen-music teaching and learning in English educational contexts.

To conduct the study, a content analysis was undertaken of the publicly available specification documents for current GCSE and A Level qualifications across Music and associated disciplines. Several themes were examined including: the inclusion/exclusion of specific forms of screen media (e.g. narrative film, music video); the use of discipline-specific terminology (e.g. ‘Mickey-mousing’); whether the study of screen music was compulsory or optional; the methods of assessment for screen music (i.e. via practical task or written examination); and the designation of specific subject content (e.g. particular composers, scores, or cues). By exploring these areas, the study provides an original understanding of the screen-music-specific skills and knowledge that learners may possess at the end of secondary school, and highlights potential areas of continuity with undergraduate screen-music curricula.

Bio

Toby Huelin is Lecturer in Music and Screen Media at the University of Leeds. His research and teaching explores music in the contemporary media industries, focusing on the production and synchronisation practices that shape audiovisual cultures. His research publications include peer-reviewed journal articles in Music and the Moving Image, Critical Studies in Television, and the European Journal of American Culture, and book chapters for several edited volumes (Palgrave Macmillan, Bloomsbury, Routledge). He is currently co-editing a volume on contemporary soundtrack production (under contract for the Ashgate Screen Music series), and recently co-edited a special issue of the journal Music, Sound, and the Moving Image on library music in digital media. He is also active within the TV industry as a media composer and is a composer-member of BAFTA as part of their Connect scheme.

Catherine Haworth, Dan White and James Moffatt: Audiovisual Media as a Pedagogical Tool for Authentic Learning and Assessment in the Undergraduate Curriculum 

This paper discusses the centrality of audiovisual media to both teaching and assessment in music courses at the University of Huddersfield. Music and Music Technology at Huddersfield is home to around 350 undergraduate students from a wide variety of educational, cultural, and socio-economic backgrounds, and offers eight undergraduate music-related courses ranging from traditional BMus courses through to BA and BSc degrees that become increasingly technically focused. These include a specific degree pathway in Music and Sound for Screen, but students on all courses engage with and benefit from a joined-up approach to audiovisual media as part of curriculum design, pedagogical strategy, and assessment methodology.  

We will present short examples from the perspective of educators with different curriculum specialties, demonstrating a scaffolded approach to audiovisual media in teaching and assessment design across a range of creative, technical, and research-based modules in Huddersfield’s undergraduate curriculum. These (related) case studies focus on: 

·       Integrated curriculum design, building in audiovisual tools as both creative practice and as research method from Level 4 upwards; 

·       The video essay as pedagogical tool and assessment format for analytical and musicological research, with a focus on digital literacy; 

·       Authentic audiovisual assessment briefs as an aspect of compositional teaching, equipping students with portfolio materials that can be pitched for industrial publication. 

Rather than discussing the common use of audiovisual materials as examples in the teaching of music and screen media, we will focus primarily on their use in knowledge acquisition, creative exploration, and research presentation. Audiovisual media is key to our design of curricula and assessments which are integrated and authentic – not only to the varied and evolving learning styles and go-to resources of our students, but also to the skills and digital literacies required of them as graduates. 

Bios

Catherine Haworth, James Moffatt and Dan White are all lecturers or senior lecturers at the University of Huddersfield, where their teaching spans areas from composition to musicology, performance and analysis. Their research focuses respectively on audiovisual media and issues of representation and identity; the contexts and practicalities of contemporary film scoring in the post-digital context; and music, sound and worldbuilding in fantasy media and transmedia franchises. 

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James Heazlewood-Dale: Video Game 'Licks': A Nintendian Approach to Jazz Theory, Analysis, and Soloing in Pedagogical Spaces [online]

In an increasingly digital age, the fusion of technology and education presents novel opportunities for engaging students in musical learning. This paper explores the integration of video game music, particularly from the Nintendo universe, into jazz education as a means of fostering improvisational skills and enriching pedagogical spaces. Drawing upon the rich improvisational elements found in Nintendo's ludic soundscapes, the study analyzes three selected solos from three Nintendo games: Super Mario Odyssey (2017), Dr. Mario (1990), and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (2017). The central thesis posits that video game music offers a unique and valuable resource for teaching jazz theory and improvisation within educational spaces. Through detailed case studies and analysis, the paper demonstrates the pedagogical affordances of incorporating video game music into jazz education, ultimately advocating for the establishment of a database of transcriptions to facilitate further exploration of jazz improvisation within spaces of learning through the lens of video game music. By building on the work of scholars, including Andrew Lesser, Brent Ferguson, T.J. Laws-Nicola, Stefano Marino, and Alan Elkins, this research contributes to the evolving discourse on jazz education by offering innovative approaches to teaching improvisation and analysis while celebrating the cultural significance of video game music in contemporary music studies.

Bio

Growing up in Australia, scholar, performer, and Grammy-nominated bassist James Heazlewood-Dale relocated to Boston to study jazz at the Berklee College of Music and then the New England Conservatory, both on full scholarships. He has since performed with artists, including Jacob Collier, Maria Schneider, and Terence Blanchard. This past August, he received his Ph.D. in musicology from Brandeis University. His doctoral research explores the intersection of jazz and video game music. James’s research can be read in Jazz and Culture and Environmental Humanities and the Video Game.He currently teaches at Brandeis University, lecturing on game studies and ludomusicology.

Tim Johnston: Putting the Theory (Back) into Practice: the Case for Teaching Traditional Technique in an Age of MIDI and AI [flash presentation] 

In this brief presentation, I would like to make the case for teaching traditional compositional techniques within a media music classroom and how, in my own teaching experience, there is an underappreciated hunger for this from students including those within industry-focussed/vocational arts degrees. I will demonstrate how core musical ideas such as motivic development and orchestration can be taught, even when there is limited or no score reading skills to rely upon within the cohort, and the language that may be used to communicate the purpose of this knowledge to the classroom.

Bio

Tim Johnston is a composer and early career researcher making music which crosses stylistic boundaries between folk music, media music, and contemporary classical repertoire, all underpinned by a scholarly and aesthetic interest in music as a narrative medium. In addition to multiple film credits to his name, feature-length and shorts, he gained his PhD in composition at Cardiff University in 2024, under the supervision of Dr Robert Fokkens and Dr Carlo Cenciarelli. Tim is now based at the University of Gloucestershire where he teaches composition for screen media on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.

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Kenneth Lampl: Film Music Composition and Creative Practice 

This presentation introduces the pedagogical framework outlined in my forthcoming book, Film Music: Composition and Creative Practice (Routledge), which is the result of over 25 years of teaching film scoring in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Rooted in my teaching experience and studies with John Williams, the book systematically examines the fundamental principles of film composition—melody, harmony, countermelody, and texture—offering both analytical insights and structured composition exercises.

The methodology introduces students to systematic compositional techniques, including motivic and phrase construction, diatonic and chromatic harmonic progressions, imitative and free counterpoint, and textural accompaniment strategies. These concepts are explored through detailed analysis of film scores such as Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, Lord of the Rings, The Dark Knight, and Inception. Additionally, the book includes tiered composition exercises that reinforce these techniques and provide a step-by-step approach to developing a film score.

This presentation will outline the book’s structure, key pedagogical concepts, and how this method can be applied in academic and professional training programs. The concepts can be directly integrated into existing curricula, offering educators structured frameworks for developing students’ skills in melody, harmony, counterpoint, and texture within the context of film scoring. This approach provides composition instructors with adaptable lesson plans, structured exercises, and analytical techniques to enhance both introductory and advanced courses. It will be particularly relevant to educators, composers, and researchers seeking a methodical, practice-based approach to film music education.

Bio

Kenneth Lampl is a Professor of Music at the Australian National University, where he teaches film music and music production. A former student of John Williams, he is the author of Film Music: The Basics (Routledge, 2023) and the forthcoming Film Music Composition and Creative Practice (Routledge, 2026). An award-winning composer, he has scored over 100 films, including Pokemon: The First Movie, Frontera, Sissy, and 2067. Lampl has also collaborated on orchestral projects with Foreigner, Evanescence, and Radiohead.

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Daniel Bishop: Teaching and Experiencing Music in Global Cinema [online] 

In this presentation, I will offer an overview of my work on the course “Music in Global Cinema,” a 200-level Gen Ed elective course with a typical enrollment of roughly sixty non-majors. I will qualitatively summarize course content, assessment, and modalities of instruction, arguing that these modalities (including in-person, online, hybrid, 15-, 8-, and 6-week sessions), are functionally symbiotic with the nature of the topic itself, which is necessarily modular, fluid, and non-comprehensive. I will also outline the use of small-scale written assignments in the course, as a way of gradually building musical listening and interpretive skills in an audience of students who are often otherwise uncomfortable discussing music in descriptive detail. Together, the course’s modular structure and its emphasis on experiential engagement help to differentiate it, as music appreciation course, from what I would argue is more typical centering of historical, cultural, and ideological parameters, frameworks which are not ignored in Music in Global Cinema, but which are de-centered, allowing me to instead center the development of contextually informed, but also self-consciously experiential encounters with the film soundtrack.

Bio

Daniel Bishop is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Music in General Studies department at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. He is the author of The Presence of the Past: Temporal Experience and the New Hollywood Soundtrack (Oxford University Press, 2021). His research and teaching work center around the film soundtrack.

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Matt Lawson: Film Music for All: Engaging Non-Specialists Through Video, Storytelling, and Humour 

Teaching film music to secondary school and university students, particularly those who are non-specialists or lack the technical language or theoretical understanding, presents a unique challenge. My approach focuses on engaging students through accessible language, avoiding superfluous musicological jargon, and creating an inclusive learning environment. For both age groups, I emphasise the emotional and narrative power of film music rather than its technical intricacies. This helps students connect with the subject matter without the intimidation of complex music theory or needing to consult sheet music. 

I consciously avoid the use of sheet music in my sessions, opting instead for a more auditory and visual experience. By using video clips from audiovisually interesting films, I help students experience music in context, showing how it complements and enhances the storytelling. This multisensory approach fosters a deeper understanding of the role film music plays in shaping mood, tension, and character development.

Humour and anecdotes play a key role in making the subject matter relatable. I often share stories or humorous observations about how film music has been composed (including the ubiquitous John Williams and Steven Spielberg stories about Schindler’s List and Jaws), which in turn encourages students to express their thoughts in a relaxed, informal setting. By creating an enjoyable and engaging atmosphere (dare I say fun?), students feel more confident and open to engaging with the material.

Through a balance of video analysis, relatable storytelling, and a focus on the raw emotional impact of film music, I ensure that all students—regardless of their musical background—can appreciate and understand the unique relationship between music and film. This paper takes a deep dive into some of those pedagogical techniques, and evaluates their effectiveness and pitfalls.

Bio

Dr Matt Lawson is a musicologist and Senior Lecturer in Music at Oxford Brookes University, UK, where he has worked since 2017. A screen music specialist, Matt completed his PhD at Edge Hill University, with a thesis focusing on the music used in German depictions of the Holocaust on screen. He is co-author of the general-interest book, 100 Greatest Film Scores (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), a number of articles and chapters on screen music, and is currently writing his second book. He is a keen advocate of outreach and widening participation, and enjoys speaking at schools and introducing young people to the wonderful world of film music. He is co-founder of the Sound on Screen research network.

James Deaville: The Art of the Audiovisual Clip in Teaching Music [online]

The video clip serves as a useful aid in teaching Music courses, as countless pedagogues can attest. Whether observing recreations of period performances, considering major episodes from the lives of composers, or screening improvisatory techniques, several minutes of an audiovisual example can efficiently inform and enliven a classroom discussion in ways that spoken or written words or recorded sound alone cannot (Parisi & Andon, 2016). However, the use of such classroom aids may occur at a cost, both to the source audiovisual text and to the students screening the excerpt (DeHart 2022). Taken out of context and without adequate preparation, a clip can introduce uncertainty and confusion (Reyes-Santías et al 2022), and can even cause harm, as evidenced by the recent example of Music professor Bright Sheng at the University of Michigan: his classroom presentation of a video of Othello performed in blackface caused shock among the students present and led to his censure (Schuessler 2021).

While pedagogues in the social sciences and certain humanities fields have begun producing academic work on video material in the classroom (e.g. Tognozzi 2010, Lehde 2022, Panjaitan & Hasibuan 2022), colleagues in Music have yet to study teaching with clips (though we all do it). The practice has its advantages and disadvantages: while the visual  and audio storytelling of video can effectively capture attention and convey much information in a short period of time (Nguyen 2024), it can contribute to the ongoing “clipification” of media consumption (Aly & Stephens 2019) and—as already mentioned—can offend the unprepared student. Moreover, unreflected use of video excerpts may misrepresent the source: rarely do filmmakers welcome such incursions into their cinematic texts (Samoylov 2018). I propose a series of self-reflexive questions for Music instructors to address before showing a clip: What does visuality contribute to (or detract from) the student’s experience of the musical example? How does the clip advance my pedagogical goals? How does it stand in relationship with the originating text in part and as a whole? Will it possibly cause harm? Taking into account such considerations can enhance the classroom experience for both instructor and students.

Bio

James Deaville is Professor in the School for Studies in Art and Culture: Music at Carleton. University, Ottawa. He edited Music in Television (Routledge, 2010) and co-edited Music and the Broadcast Experience (Oxford University Press, 2016), The Oxford Handbook of Music & Advertising (2021), and The Oxford Handbook of Music & Television (forthcoming). He is currently working on monographs on trailer music and sound, and on the captioning of music and sound in (streaming) television.

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Tom Harrison: Using an Electric Piano in the HE Composition for Screen Classroom [online] 

This paper explores the various ways that I use an electric piano/keyboard when teaching composition for screen. A keyboard is a useful vehicle for demonstrating how music can be altered in real time in order to change the way that it affects the image. Often, I will take a musical idea from a student's piece of work and play it on the keyboard showing the various ways that they might change musical parameters such as mode, key, rhythm, or timbre. 

Unlike an acoustic piano, a budget-friendly keyboard such as a Roland FP-10 allows for the use of strings to demonstrate sustained textures. Rather than relying on recordings, the use of a keyboard allows for a great deal of flexibility when I'm teaching and allows me to tailor the teaching to student needs. 

I use the keyboard when analysing the music of established composers. Reducing orchestral scores to a piano version allows students to focus on the music’s component parts such as the harmony or modulatory structure. This music can then be altered at the keyboard to demonstrate why the composers made their various musical decisions in order to tell the story of the picture. 

What level of keyboard skills are required to teach in this manner? I argue that a somewhat rudimentary set of keyboard skills will suffice in order to take advantage of the various pedagogical concepts outlined.

Bio

Tom Harrison recently completed his PhD at the Royal College of Music. He spent a decade working as a film composer in Hollywood where he worked on the music teams for some of television’s biggest shows. His music has been used in over 200 different television series and his book How to Become a Film Composer is published by Hal Leonard. Harrison held a Senior Lecturer position at the ACM for 3 years and has since gone on to teach at BIMM and the London College of Music.

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Júlia Durand: What does the (library) music mean here? Library music as a pedagogical tool 

Despite library music’s growth as an industry and artistic practice, it remains conspicuously absent from the curricula of higher learning institutions (Gomes-Ribeiro, Malhado 2024). Nevertheless, it has long been present in teaching strategies for music and media courses (Tagg 2006), namely for “commutation tests” (Graakjaer 2015, 104) (where the same visuals are paired with different music). I focus here on an inversion of that method, where students analyse the same library track and its uses across different audiovisual productions. 

By inquiring into the results of this exercise, carried out over five years in an undergraduate musicology course, I argue that its pedagogical outcomes are three-fold. Firstly, it sheds light on the specificities of library music, both as a professional avenue for musicians and as a field of scholarly inquiry. In particular, as the study of library music often calls for an interdisciplinary approach, it highlights the importance of a multifaceted perspective when tackling music for moving images. Secondly, it alerts students to the issue of media literacy in an audiovisual landscape where library music is increasingly wielded in the shaping of social and political action. Lastly, by examining the manifold ways in which the same library track is deployed in widely contrasting productions (and the contrasting messages it can contribute to), it allows for a broader discussion of musical meaning in media, aligned with Nicholas Cook’s (1998, 8) advice on the matter: to not simply ask “what does the music mean”, but, instead, “what does the music mean here”. 

Bio

Júlia Durand is a musicology researcher at the NOVA University of Lisbon and a member of the Center of Sociology and Musical Aesthetics (CESEM). In addition to several papers on music and audiovisual media presented at international conferences such as Music and the Moving Image, her work has been published in edited volumes (such as Remediating Sound: Repeatable Culture, YouTube and Music) and in journals such as Music, Sound and the Moving Image, Time & Society, and Media, Culture and Society. Her current research focuses on the production and use of library music in online media.