The Intimate Lives of a Music Institution

Funded by Gerry Farrell Awards

Title: The Intimate Lives of a Music Institution: The Catalonia School of Music

Recipient: Javier Rivas Rodríguez, PhD Candidate, Music Department, King’s College London

Date: August-December 2022

This report gives an overview of four months of fieldwork (August-December 2022) conducted in the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya (roughly translated Catalonia School of Music, and hereafter Esmuc ) as part of my PhD research. This initial stage of fieldwork was made possible through the generous funding of Sempre and the Gerry Farrell Travelling Scholarship. The aim of my research is to study the educational project of the Esmuc, and the ways in which lecturers and students make sense of and support or oppose the project in their day-to-day lives. The Esmuc was founded in 2001 as an alternative to the (Spanish) conservatoire system, offering academic programmes in jazz, flamenco, popular music, musicology, pedagogy, and management alongside Western early, classical, and contemporary music. At the core of the Esmuc project was an attempt to promote equal coexistence and mixture of different musical traditions, as well as compulsory tuition in musicology and other “theoretical” subjects for all students, including performance students. The goal was to encourage reflection on the historical and cultural specificity of performance practices, and to move away from the hyper-specialization of the classical performer in the conservatoire cultural system towards a more general artistic training. The Esmuc provides an excellent case study to trace the recent debates and transformations in music education, what has been done so far, and what remains to be done.