Global Conservatoire

The Royal Danish Academy of Music (RDAM) launches in collaboration with the Manhattan School of Music (New York), the Royal College of Music (London) and mdw - Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst (Vienna) Global Conservatoire, an ambitious digital teaching environment that transcends time and boundaries.

The Global Conservatoire will be an extension of each institution's range of courses and promote cross-cultural understanding, collaboration skills, and an international network of students and lecturers. By consolidating partners' shared experience in the digital world of education and unique subject matter expertise, the Global Conservatoire is a groundbreaking collaboration that crosses borders and connects students from four prominent international conservatories to a global digital learning environment.

The innovative partnership will be launched in a pilot edition in the academic year 2021-22. The course catalogue will be expanded each year during the partnership's first five years with an equal distribution of courses between the partner institutions based on the individual institution's expertise. The partnership supports an international perspective in the course content. It equips the students to perform in an international labour market and meets the students' increased need for flexible study patterns and desires for new, global perspectives on music education.

Classical music teaching primarily uses teaching formats that require physical presence. Global Conservatoire's courses will consist of courses with mainly asynchronous content with a few synchronous online sessions that help build and nurture the relationships between teachers and students. The asynchronous course design enables students from the four conservatories in three different time zones to work at their own pace and complete courses in a global classroom from home, thus giving students the greatest possible flexibility without compromising the quality of teaching.

As Uffe Savery, President of the Royal Danish Academy of Music (RDAM), sees it:

"First of all, I am incredibly proud on behalf of the Royal Danish Academy of Music that we are part of such a unique partnership with such significant international conservatories. Such a collaboration is based on a very high degree of respect and recognition for each other's institutions.

Also, there is no doubt that all four of our conservatories can mutually enrich and inspire each other with the cultural differences that will always be. At the same time, there is a clear shared vision to strengthen the importance of music in society and human beings and educate the best possible graduates to create and meet the music and cultural life of the future.

The Global Conservatoire helps to strengthen the education of our graduates. They get a greater wide-angle on their view of music life and a strengthening of networks and knowledge of others in the international music life. When a young person applies for and is admitted to one of the four educational institutions, he or she will also have access to the other three conservatories - in a proper Global Conservatoire mindset. A unique opportunity - a unique collaboration. I am very much looking forward to developing the Global Conservatoire in the coming years."

The first course to be offered under the Global Conservatoire is "Music and Words", which the Royal College of Music provides. RDAM offers two courses in the spring semester; "Music Production for Musicians" by Associate Professor Jesper Andersen and "Nordic Noir - structure and melancholy in Nordic music" by Associate Professor Søren Schauser, who elaborates here:

"Music is a world language. A musician can easily work with another musician and does so in many places every single day. Global Conservatoire is the Danish music education's most ambitious project to date in international cooperation. The courses take the conservatories' globalisation into the next gear. We give the concept of "world-class" a whole new meaning! I throw myself over "Nordic Noir" as one of the first. The course introduces Scandinavia's most important composers, with Carl Nielsen as one of the stars. But I would also like to ask our European and American students to think about the music in their own countries and think a little about the national differences - if there are any."

For RDAM, it provides a unique opportunity to expand the range of courses, share knowledge and draw on experiences from other internationally recognised conservatories within digital music education. For several years, RDAMhas focused on distance learning, and the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular, has boosted the amount of and innovation in digital teaching methods and methods, which now benefits even more students. The Global Conservatoire is also a unique opportunity for RDAM's teachers to test digital learning methods in practice partly and partly to become part of a more extensive teaching, artistic development and research environment across borders. Therefore, RDAM sees the Global Conservatoire as an obvious opportunity to raise the quality of and methods for online teaching in music and performing arts to benefit students, the institutions as a whole and the global music and art World.

FACTS

Manhattan School of Music (https://www.msmnyc.edu/)
Royal College of Music (https://www.rcm.ac.uk/)
mdw - Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien (https://www.mdw.ac.at/)
Det Kongelige Danske Musikkonservatorium (https://dkdm.dk/)

Initially a five year cooperation, starting off with a pilot version in the academic year of 2021-2022

Global Conservatoire in the Digital Age (GLOCODA) is an Erasmus+ project financed with support from the European Commission.
GLOCODA is part of Global Conservatoire, a digital collaboration between four partner institutions: The Royal Danish Academy of Music (RDAM), Royal College of Music (RCM), Manhattan School of Music (MSM), and University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (mdw).