The Music Department has published, on the department YouTube channel, a series of six educational videos, produced by Dr Ian Dickson and Dr Simone Tarsitani, on eighteenth-century European harmony, focusing on the Bach chorale. The big finish to Part 6 is a performance given by four talented Durham students.

Durham climbed nine places in the QS World University Rankings, to 85th. The Arts and Humanities department, of which music is a part, was ranked even higher, at 31st. 

Durham University’s Arts and Humanities subjects have performed strongly in the latest Unifresher subject rankings, helping to secure Durham’s position as the UK’s leading Russell Group university in the Unifresher 2027 Rankings.

Durham University has established a new partnership with Southwestern University (Georgetown, USA), creating a streamlined progression route for qualified Southwestern graduates onto a selection of Durham taught Master’s programmes, including many in Arts and Humanities.

Two current Durham Music PhD students, Ardi Echevarria and Yan Xin Ng, presented papers at the Royal Musical Association's Southeast Asia Chapter conference in 2026 — and both were awarded the Springer Researcher Student Prize. Durham alumnus Matthew Hansel, who completed an MA by Research in 2024, also presented.

Following a visit to Australia and New Zealand, Professor Janet Stewart, Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, has laid the groundwork for new research collaborations under Durham University’s Transformative Humanities work.

On Thursday 19 March at 4.30pm, Professor John Snijders joins artist Graham Dolphin for a public conversation exploring art, performance, and contemporary music at the Dead Dog Gallery, Durham Sixth Form Centre.

A thirty-minute animated film accompanying Durham composer Richard Rijnvos's Aphrodite for shō & string sextet (2022–23) is showing throughout March as part of Moments of Wonder, a new exhibition by Mike Collier at Vane gallery in Gateshead. Rijnvos will be present for a special screening on Wednesday 4 March at 4.30pm, ahead of the exhibition's opening preview.

Durham University Department of Music marks International Women’s Day (IWD) 2026 with a series of discussions and a special concert.

Dr Amanda Hsieh from our Department of Music has teamed up with Dr Vera Wolkowicz from the University of Glasgow to bring together 10 authors from around the world to ask a timely question: why do we need musicological perspectives beyond our own?

Professor Julian Horton’s new article ‘Corpus Studies, Sonata Typology and the Nineteenth-Century Violin Concerto’ has been published in the prestigious American journal Music Theory Spectrum.

We’ve been awarded £1.7 million to help deliver courses that will increase opportunities for students and support economic growth.