Paper on audience participation for 2020 meeting of Anescas (Association nationale d’établissements d’enseignement supérieur de la création artistique arts de la scène).
LINK
Blog: Having a career with overlapping activities in today’s multi-faceted professional music practice requires musicians to exercise many roles at the same time, roles which extend beyond their artistic skills. Musicians need to be innovative, entrepreneurial and communicative, they need to be able to create sustained partnerships, and collaborate with an eye for the contexts they relate to. They must be reflective, aware of what is needed in order to generate their work and to produce work of high quality. This includes that they recognize their individual needs for learning and development. In sum, musicians need to exercise leadership, which is, quoting David Myers: “…a very different message from the frequently unspoken subtext that if one expects to survive as a musician, he or she will necessarily piece together a potentially random group of jobs that have the cumulative effects of compromising lofty ambitions and perpetuating the view that one is undervalued” (2007: 4).
LINK
This essay is published for the occasion of the inauguration of Evert Bisschop Boele on June 25, 2014 as professor ‘New Audiences’ of the research group Lifelong Learning in Music, Centre of Applied Research and Innovation Art & Society/Prince Claus Conservatoire, Hanze University of Applied Sciences Groningen.
Students in Higher Music Education (HME) are not facilitated to develop both their artistic and academic musical competences. Conservatoires (professional education, or ‘HBO’) traditionally foster the development of musical craftsmanship, while university musicology departments (academic education, or ‘WO’) promote broader perspectives on music’s place in society. All the while, music professionals are increasingly required to combine musical and scholarly knowledge. Indeed, musicianship is more than performance, and musicology more than reflection—a robust musical practice requires people who are versed in both domains. It’s time our education mirrors this blended profession. This proposal entails collaborative projects between a conservatory and a university in two cities where musical performance and musicology equally thrive: Amsterdam (Conservatory and University of Amsterdam) and Utrecht (HKU Utrechts Conservatorium and Utrecht University). Each project will pilot a joint program of study, combining existing modules with newly developed ones. The feasibility of joint degrees will be explored: a combined bachelor’s degree in Amsterdam; and a combined master’s degree in Utrecht. The full innovation process will be translated to a transferable infrastructural model. For 125 students it will fuse praxis-based musical knowledge and skills, practice-led research and academic training. Beyond this, the partners will also use the Comenius funds as a springboard for collaboration between the two cities to enrich their respective BA and MA programs. In the end, the programme will diversify the educational possibilities for students of music in the Netherlands, and thereby increase their professional opportunities in today’s job market.