The School promotes musical performance and composition as legitimate fields of research alongside musicology, and the University awards funding for research in all three areas on an equal basis.

Our areas of expertise include:

• instrumental/vocal composition, especially for large mixed chamber ensembles and orchestra
• sonic arts, including fixed-media multichannel composition, live electronics and sound installations
• film scoring and digital orchestration; audio recording, production and post-production, including spatial audio and sound design for film
• sonic arts engineering, including musical mechatronics, digital signal processing and game sound design
• ethnomusicology, with an emphasis on ethnographic research and music cultures of the Asia-Pacific region
• music in New Zealand, including analysis and performance of New Zealand compositions
• historical musicology, including 17th–18th-century German and British music, 19th-century music history and analysis, 19th–20th-century music history of New Zealand and Australia
• historical, critical and theoretical approaches to popular music, including jazz studies
• musical embodiment, performance studies, and music-dance relationships, as well as performance technologies and live arts
• jazz performance, including live improvisation of composed music, as well as composition and performance of music in ensembles
• music therapy in school and community settings, music and wellbeing, integration of research and clinical teaching of music therapy
• vocal, orchestral and chamber music performance, opera production and stagecraft