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 exploring various non-western, or “world” musics.

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 her or his 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.

“A true music school must return to being a healthy environment for the evolution of music as well as for the teaching of music. In this way, those who study will be most prepared to participate in what is sure to be the multi-dimensional musical environment of the coming decades.”

– David Rosenboom, Composer and Dean, California Institute of the Arts

In addition to studying the fundamental principles of musical technique, intuitive musical awareness and self-analysis 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?” Students without a clear sense of their own original voice will be dysfunctional in the future.

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. They will relax amongst their own kind while collaborating in an intense, but non-competitive, atmosphere which values innovation and evolution. Participants will have ample opportunities to perform over the course of each seminar, but no prescribed repertoire will be offered nor are there examinations of any sort. Each seminar demands only that each participant assume control of their own musical path.

Credit, for those who qualify and wish to have it, can be obtained through the California Institute of the Arts (a member of NASM).