Announcing the Colin Currie Scholarship for Percussion

Colin Currie is personally donating a $1000 scholarship to Chosen Vale for a student demonstrating exceptional talent as a percussionist and the potential to be a leader in the field of percussion.

Who We Are

The Center for Advanced Musical Studies is a place for talented musicians who share the mutual goals of exploring their personal voice and expanding their artistic capacities.

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.

Photo Credit: Bob Malone

The Center for Advanced Musical Studies at Chosen Vale exists 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 new-found stimulation by collaborating with composers, composing themselves, and playing the music of their friends.

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.

Musical societies in the coming decades will require musicians to be increasingly flexible, original, and to have an ever broadening set of skills. We believe that rather than simply fostering a steady accumulation of inert, skill-based knowledge, each and every musician should be focusing on developing a wide-ranging and original musical voice in order to become the type of artist who will thrive in the emerging world. Music education has to not only keep pace with change, it must foster change as well.

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

What We Do

The Center for Advanced Musical Studies burst onto the international music scene in 2006 by presenting the Chosen Vale International Trumpet Seminar. Participants during our first five years have included award winning trumpeters from fifteen countries that have become finalists and winners of major competitions, obtained chairs in such ensembles as the Canadian and Dallas Brass, won positions in important world orchestras, curated music at major museums, and won a Grammy Award. Many mid-career professionals have joined us to sharpen their skills and to reconnect to the latest in our ever expanding repertoire and art forms.

Emboldened by the success of our trumpet seminars and firm in our belief that there is no better way to enrich ourselves as musicians than being surrounded by the best faculty and peers the world has to offer while being totally immersed in creating difficult music, the director and trustees of the Center for Advanced Musical Studies have decided to expand to a second offering, the Chosen Vale International Percussion Seminar, which will immediately follow our trumpet seminar in 2012.

2012 TRUMPET SEMINAR ANNOUNCED
June 18 – 30, 2012

2012 PERCUSSION SEMINAR ANNOUNCED
July 2 – 14, 2011

In addition to studying the fundamental principles of musical technique, intuitive musical awareness, self-analysis, and honesty are critical to musical development. Students must be periodically asking the questions “What am I doing? What are the ideas connecting concepts in all my work? What are the larger concepts that can embrace all of my individual ideas? and How can I identify my own unique voice within musical languages?”

Musicians, vocational and non, who attend one of the seminars at the Center for Advanced Musical Studies will experience total immersion in their own particular art, offered by an internationally renowned faculty within a highly creative and supportive environment of honesty, obsession, and love for music making. They come to Chosen Vale to find a clear sense of their own original voice within the commonality of ideas expressed by the faculty and their peers and relax amongst their own kind while collaborating in an intense, but non-competitive, atmosphere which values innovation and evolution. Participants will have ample opportunity to perform over the course of each seminar, but no prescribed solo repertoire will be offered nor are there examinations of any sort. Our seminars demand only that each participant assume control of their own musical path.