Most that are currently studying music are familiar with the large-scale cultural shifts, migration, and evolution of the musical marketplace taking place over the last decade, but simply don’t know what to do about them nor how to respond. They are ready to jump into something bound with hope.

The Center for Advanced Musical Studies at Chosen Vale has been created at a time when rapid changes are sweeping the musical landscape. New and emerging musics, free, as well as traditional, improvisation, non-conventional ensembles, and new technologies/media are joining our concert stages at a dizzying rate. Many of our greatest artists are searching for new ways to re-interpret and present the acknowledged masterpieces of western music as well as experiencing newfound stimulation by collaborating with composers, composing themselves, and playing the music of their friends.

Musical societies in the coming decades will require musicians to be increasingly flexible, original, and to have an ever broadening set of skills. Rather than simply fostering a steady accumulation of inert, skill-based knowledge, each and every musician today should be focusing on developing his or her original musical voice in order to become a total musician for the emerging world. Music education has to not only keep pace with change, it must foster change as well.

Careful observation of the past fifty years or so of musical study has identified two alarming trends — a rigid separation of performers from composers/composers from performers (and audiences from both!) and an inflexible specialization by young musicians, training to gain a professional foothold in a rapidly changing musical world.

As traditional ways and places to make music evolve, musicians will be required to be increasingly original and entrepreneurial. Total musical immersion at the Center for Advanced Musical Studies will illuminate paths that develop individual musical invention in parallel with musical discipline.

– Edward Carroll, Director