RCM has joined up with the Manhattan School of Music (MSM), the Royal Danish Academy of Music (RDAM), and the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (MDW).
The four conservatoires have together launched the Global Conservatoire, an ambitious digital learning environment that will expand each institutional partner’s course offerings, opening up a new and flexible world of asynchronous courses against a rich cultural backdrop.
The partnership, which launches as a pilot programme in 2021–22 with one course in the autumn term and additional offerings in spring, will bring faculty and students from each of the four institutional partners into an online classroom, cultivating an international exchange of ideas. The programme’s asynchronous design will allow students from four conservatories in three different time zones to work at their own pace, completing courses around busy rehearsal and practice schedules.
The Global Conservatoire, which will be available to both undergraduate and postgraduate students, seeks to draw on its partners’ wide-ranging background and extensive collaboration in distance learning prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, combined with the lessons learned from last spring’s rapid-response pivot to online learning through this academic year.
From a statement issued by the leaders of the Global Conservatoire’s four partner institutions, Professor Colin Lawson, Director, RCM; James Gandre, President, MSM; Uffe Savery, President, RDAM; Ulrike Sych, Rector, MDW: “We are so pleased that an idea sprung from our collective discussions in the autumn of 2019 has blossomed so fully and efficiently, and with an immediacy that reflect the times in which we find ourselves.
Individually, each institution that comprises the Global Conservatoire (GC) educates future artists, arts administrators and educators. What the GC, an entirely new type of virtual inter-university, international environment, will do is effectively broaden each of the four partners’ curricular offerings and add a truly global dimension to their students’ learning experience. We are proud to launch the Global Conservatoire and to welcome our students to a new digital age of global learning.”
