Royal College of Music

The Royal College of Music is a conservatoire in South Kensington, London, founded in 1882 and opened in 1883 on Prince Consort Road beside the Royal Albert Hall. It was created by royal charter as a specialist school of music rather than a multi-faculty university, and it has kept that single-field structure. The site sits in the Victorian museum quarter of Kensington, and the college grew as a training ground for performers, composers and conductors rather than by adding unrelated faculties.

Graduate work is organized around performance, composition, conducting, opera and academic music, not a set of separate colleges. Students use the RCM Museum of musical instruments, the Britten Theatre and college ensembles that perform in the Albert Hall and other London halls. Research in performance practice and musicology sits beside studio teaching.

The college enrolls about 900 students, with a large postgraduate share and an international share of about half, from more than 50 countries. Teaching staff number in the low hundreds and are mostly active performers. Alumni include composers Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst and Benjamin Britten.

Graduate awards include the Master of Music, MPhil, Doctor of Music and PhD, plus artist diplomas. The model is one-to-one principal-study tuition, ensembles and recitals, with a thesis for research degrees. Scholarships, prizes and named awards are the usual form of support. Students study in central London, within walking distance of museums and concert halls.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, Royal College of Music lists 1 master's program, in music.