Musicians of Tomorrow
In a teaching room at the Maastricht Conservatory, the grand piano is silent. The group of students around the table discusses their research question. Because in addition to the many hours that they study on their instrument or work on their voice, they do research. While they work on their technique with their main subject teacher and talk about the interpretation of scores, they ask different questions about their profession in their research. As a classical guitarist, how can I use the interactive streaming site Twitch to reach the youth of my own generation with Baroque guitar music? And why is the beautiful piano music that composers wrote after 1923 in my native Turkey, so little known among lovers of classical music and how can I change that as a pianist?
In addition to philharmonie zuidnederrland and Maastricht University, the MCICM also has art education at Zuyd Hogeschool as a partner. Because in higher music education, learning through research is increasingly important in order to better prepare students for their future practice. From the research centre Art, Autonomy and the Public Sphere at Zuyd, which focuses on artistic research and engagement in the arts under the leadership of Ruth Benschop, Imogen Eve has worked in recent years with conservatory students to innovate their practice. She wrote a beautiful book about it: the same but differently.
Innovation, Eve writes, doesn't just mean making something new, it also means thinking and doing things differently. “It assumes we are rethinking why we do things the way we do them. That we think about what our values are and how our practice corresponds to those values.' In her book, she examines the origin of core values in classical music, such as fidelity to the score and listening in attentive silence. But she also gives concrete exercises – 'études' – to explore new values and skills, such as imagining the space in which a piece will sound – an industrial space, a dim church, an old country house – and how that space music experience changes.
There is so much beauty and expressiveness about the art form classical music, concludes Eve. Precisely to continue this rich history, music students, as the musicians of tomorrow, investigate how they could develop new concert rituals and forms of performance. So the grand piano remains closed for a while and it is about Twitch instead of the Concertgebouw and about Ulvi Cemal Erkin instead of Claude Debussy.
Peter Peters, director MCICM
