The Institute for Pop Music

The Institute for Pop Music at Folkwang University of the Arts began teaching and learning activities at the Folkwang Campus Bochum in October 2014. It offers an advanced master’s programme for artists who, under the supervision of a team of professionally qualified lecturers, comprehensively develop their artistic profile over four semesters. Through freely selectable combinations of different artistic disciplines and in joint or individual projects, aesthetics, reflection, economics and legal issues are brought together to form a whole. The programme culminates in a Master of Music degree.

The institute sees itself not only as a place of learning, but also as a place of thought. Building on an emancipatory concept of pop as a low-threshold, non-elitist form of art and thought, the programme understands artistic practice as a means of participation, empowerment and opening up to the contemporary arts. It is anchored in the Folkwang University of the Arts’ self-image as a place of interdisciplinary artistic, educational and scientific research, teaching and practice.

The programme focuses on sound as a starting point for the development of contemporary positions in music, performance, art and concept. The fusion of the arts is a method traditionally strongly anchored at Folkwang University, which is undergoing transdisciplinary opening and expansion through the programme.