This strategic partnership was based on years of collaboration of several European conservatoires where the music master programme for New Audiences and Innovative Practice (NAIP) was developed and implemented. The partnership also included new partners, which had in the years before the start of the project witnessed the progress of the NAIP programme and thus gained interest in its methodologies and ideology. This partnership project consisted of several events over two years period aimed at further development, improvement and promoting of methodology and joint curriculum using mobility in the form of two intensive study programmes, three working groups, two joint staff training events and two periods of staff development. The core of the NAIP programme is creative collaborative learning, where mentoring and practice based research play a major role. The aim is to be a platform for professional integration, entrepreneurship, creative collaborative practice, cross-arts and cross-sector practice and community engagement within the domain of higher education. This is particularly relevant as the music world is increasingly in need of more variety of skillful and flexible musicians capable of relating to society and finding new roles and carriers, at the same time as traditional employment opportunities are less and less accessible. The programme calls for creative musicians who have achieved a high standard of performance and show strong potential of entrepreneurship, leadership and communication skills. This project has strengthened the foundations of developing and promoting creative collaborative learning with enhanced quality, utilizing cross border collaboration and extensive dissemination and thereby making way for greater relevance of higher music education in Europe and beyond.

"The main focus of the Strategic Partnership project “RAPP Lab – How Reflectiveness and Critical Thinking Empower Musicians to Create New Economic and Cultural Roles and Structures” is on how the reflective methodologies of artistic research empower musicians to creatively respond to the economic-cultural environment with which they are confronted – a more dispersive, multi-layered, dynamic environment than the one the European conservatoire systems were designed for. RAPP Lab is based on the premise that the way of handling artistic material can change through reflection (new practices, concert formats, learning formats etc.). This will have effects on learning and teaching in Music HEI and on the continuous personal self-development of musicians as they participate in the civic and social life of the future. Having gained new knowledge through reflectiveness and critical thinking empowers students, graduates and teachers to create new economic and cultural roles and as a consequence to increase cultural participation. Benefiting in the longer term, RAPP Lab’s potential for an entrepreneurial dimension in HME is not only to support the students’ artistic development but also to equip them with the appropriate ‘meta-skills’. The ‘meta skills’ of adaptability, of going through processes of reflection, of turning obstacles into opportunities and of simply ‘making things happen’ are going to be as relevant in their own way for the musicians of the future as their core musical skills. At the same time, a musician equipped with these skills is going to shape more likely a full and engaged role in society, using their musical and reflective skills not just to promote their own careers but also to be in close contact to the ‘real-world’ around them. These are the main objectives:1. Widening the knowledge of musical practitioners and the scope of their future education through reflectiveness and critical thinking2. Complementing high specialisation in music practice with additional forms of knowledge-production 3. Developing prototypical forms of teaching, learning and continuous self-development (Labs 1-6)4. Empowering musicians to create new economic and cultural roles and structuresSteps towards such goals are the following: As a first step, the RAPP Lab team will define a preliminary draft of standards (Guidelines for the methodology, experimental settings etc.) that will be used to finally agree on a set of shared criteria for the relations of critical reflection, artistic practice and additional forms of teaching, learning and continuous self-development. These standards will lead to four work packages, who will identify the theoretical concept of the project and the different project activities, and are the basis for the evaluation of the respective activities. RAPP Lab consists of a pool of various activities linked together as a puzzle to generate new modules, methods, experimental settings and transferable modules for acquiring artistic skills through critical thinking and reflection-based practice. Each activity takes a different perspective on the meta-theme ""RAPP Lab"" and develops a suitable implementation (Lab 1-6) depending on the specific focus of the activity. Each focus is central to the question of the development of new prototypical forms of teaching and learning through reflectiveness and critical thinking and refers to relevant aspects within the discourse of artistic research. Each LTT-activity (Lab 1-6) will specialize on one experimental setting for/in acquiring artistic skills and will lead or be part of the four intellectual outputs. The Labs will be represented through online-tutorials, interviews and web-based tool-kits on a final web-platform.RAPP Lab’s participants are teachers, researchers, institutional leaders and students (BA/MA and PhD) of each institution of the project consortium, led by the HFMT Cologne. The Strategic Partnership involves various European HME, each of which contributes to RAPP Lab's multi-thematic approach with an individual LTT activity (RAPP Labs 1-6).RAPP Lab is based on these three main pillars:1. Providing reflectiveness and critical thinking through artistic research By: Bootcamps, workshops, experimental settings on: Developing Cognitive skills (Lab 1), Critical Reflection (Lab 2), Phenomenology (Lab 3), Transculturality (Lab 4), Autoethnography (Lab 5), Improvisation (Lab 6).2. New methods of teaching integrated in HME in order to empower students to find and create their own employment opportunities and cultural rolesBy: Creating Guidelines, developing and redefining modules and promoting experimental learning-teaching formats3. Dissemination of that new teaching and understandingBy: Transferable exemplars, tutorials, interviews, web-based tool-kits, interactive web-platform, multiplier events and evaluation"

Chamber music is a crucial component in the curricula for higher education in music performance all over the world. Evidence from various sources shows a shift from employment with fixed contracts to an employment situation in with musicians are self-employed and combine different professional activities in the form of a portfolio career. The partners of “ECMA Next Step” has taken this situation in, and has worked intensively for three years to raise awareness of the importance of high quality chamber music training in the higher music education institutions. The partners believe that chamber music is a vital pedagogical tool for the training of transversal skills for the musician in the 21st century as chamber music addresses team work, peer-learning and reflective practice, all of which will prepare students for future careers as all-rounded and adaptable musicians. The partners also believe that there is a lack of a high quality educational programme to educate chamber groups in Europe. Therefore, the European Chamber Music Master (ECMAster) has been developed throughout this project. The ECMAster is a statement that chamber music not only functions a tool to educate all-rounded musicians, but also as a goal in itself – to provide a master programme of excellence for chamber music groups that is looking to build their careers around their ensemble. Objectives are: 1) the development of new content for the ECMA training programme and the music performance programmes at the higher music education institutions in terms of curriculum, mobility, assessment and pedagogical knowledge and skills of chamber music teachers. 2) The establishment of a Joint European Master Programme in Chamber Music. The project has had ten partners. Seven HEIs with long standing collaborative relations between each other and with other higher music education institutions. All seven institutions are highly international oriented, and brought expertise in music education at the highest level in general and chamber music education in particular. Two partners have been well-established and internationally oriented music festivals with a focus on chamber music. These partners have contributed valuable professional context both in discussions about the outcomes of the project, but also in terms of being hosts for two of the IPs. The last partner is The European Association of Conservatoires (AEC), which role has been the evaluation and dissemination of the project results. Our project organised nine Intensive Programmes, two Joint Staff Training Events and one Multiplier Event. On top of that, we had three categories transnational meeting: Steering Group (4 meetings), Working Group on teaching and learning (6 meetings) and Working Group on Joint Master (6 meetings). *The participants for the Intensive Programmes were student chamber groups from partner institutions and the topics were workshops, lessons, master classes, rehearsals, concerts, lectures and group discussions.*The two Joint Staff Training Events had as a primary focus to develop, review and test assessment criteria and assessment forms for chamber music, and to train teachers in using them actively in their assessment of students.*The Multiplier Event with the topic “The role of chamber music in higher music education” was held during the AEC Congress in November 2017. 85 international participants and 12 local participants attended.*The Steering Group met four times throughout the project period to discuss progress, direction, priorities, practical matters and budget. *The Working Group for Teaching and Learning met six times and was tasked with developing the content for the outcome called “O1 – Teaching and Learning Manual”. The group discussed contents, pedagogical methods and organisational approaches to chamber music in the involved institutions, and assessment criteria, procedures and grading in chamber music, as well as teaching methods, and technological tools for learning and teaching.*The Working Group for Joint Master had six meetings where they worked on the design of a programme description and a consortium agreement for a Joint European Master in Chamber Music. Possible ways of financing the programme was also discussed in these meetings.Our number one priority as described in the application was to improve the quality and relevance of higher music education, and our project has done just that. All the partner institutions have used the information gained about chamber music and curricula in general to generate change in their own institutions. The project has also had an impact on the students, teachers and managers who participated in the project activities, and the long-term effect of institutional change will in term also benefit these people, but even more so the future students going into higher music education. We also believe that we have reached high sustainability in our project through the establishment of the ECMAster.

Reflective Entrepreneurial Music Education Worldclass - RENEW’ is a two years project (2016-2018) developed by five higher music education institutions (The Royal Academy of Music Aarhus, The Royal Conservatoire The Hague, The Norwegian Academy of Music, The Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Sibelius Academy) and a European network organization (The Association Européenne des Conservatoires, Académies de Musique et Musikhochschulen - AEC). The project has directly contributed to the improvement of the employability of future music graduates through the artistic, pedagogical and entrepreneurial development of higher music education studies while initiating a cultural shift within institutions by changing teachers’ mind-set and approaches to guiding students through their programmes-Developing an entrepreneurial mind-set, including instinctively self-critical and reflective processes. During the two years of the project implementation, the six RENEW partners have worked together on the development of tools and models to generate change inside institutions. Each project partner has planned, hosted and successfully delivered five student bootcamps (one per HME partner institution) involving both teachers and students from very different disciplines and providing them with conceptual tools placing entrepreneurship in the wider context. In addition, the RENEW consortium has organised a joint entrepreneurial staff training for teaching staff that has brought together international experts to design staff development sessions aimed at teaching staff members involved in promoting an entrepreneurial mind-set within institutions as well as regular teaching staff members.Based on the experience and know-how gathered during the project teaching/learning/training activities, the RENEW project consortium has provided HME institutions with a description of how to implement a Joint European Module for Entrepreneurship teaching. The concrete results give guidelines about the establishment of several Joint European Modules mixing elements both at local and international level. The joint module description includes information on the curriculum in terms of content, workload and teaching methodologies- Arrangements for admission and assessment- Quality assurance arrangements- Models for financial sustainability in terms of costs and tuition fees. In addition, the RENEW project has succeeded in expanding the entrepreneurial mind-set among HME institutions in Europe and helping them better understand the importance of this topic and the need of addressing it in order to be able to help future students engage and face the profession. The partner institutions participating in the project have develop tools and expertise that will allow them to implement entrepreneurship in their curricula and train their teaching staff for them to be able to answer the challenges involved in preparing students for the profession. In the long term, not only the institutions that have directly participated in the development of the project will see be benefit from the outcomes of the project but also all HME institutions inside the AEC network (around 90% of all the HME institutions in Europe) will count with models and tools to better embed entrepreneurship in their curricula.

"The project focuses on a specific area of higher music education within the jazz genre, larger jazz ensembles. At the same time, it aims at establishing better links between jazz education and working life.Ensemble training is increasingly seen as an important pedagogical tool for the training of transversal skills vital for the musician in the 21st century: team working, peer-learning and reflective practice are essential principles, which will support musicians to prepare themselves to be reflective practitioners in their future portfolio careers. It is an important objective to explore the didactic possibilities of working with large ensembles in an educational context in jazz performance study programmes, just as different formats of large ensembles play a very important role in music education within the classical music genre. At the same time, it is important to revitalize the large jazz ensemble format by challenging the traditional big band format. The financial challenges classical and jazz ensembles and institutions are facing creates a window of opportunity for innovation when it comes to the music itself as well as the relationship between the various stakeholders and the audience.The project will lay the groundwork for the provision of a sustainable platform for mobility an learning that doesn’t exist today . The project will also develop study programmes for conductors for large ensembles within the jazz genre. This is relevant both for dedicated jazz ensembles and for the many classical ensembles (eg symphony orchestras) that let different forms of ""rhythmic repertoire"" become an increasingly larger part of their activities. As far as the involved project partners know, there is no conductor education aimed at this type of repertoire anywhere in the world.The objectives of the project is to:- Establish sustainable collaboration between the partners in the areas developed through the project- Explore new didactic opportunities and methodologies through work with large jazz ensembles in the education of future jazz musicians- Explore and establish relevant blended learning methods for future collaboration between the partners- Develop closer collaboration between jazz education and the labour market, represented by important jazz festivals, in order to improve working life relevance of the education and the students' entrepreneurial skills.- Develop new repertoire for large jazz ensembles- Contribute to the revitalization of the role large jazz ensembles have on the professional music and art scene- Develop and launch specialized conductor education aimed at jazz and other rhythmic genres.During the project the following number of persons will be directly involved:-100 jazz performance students involved in Intensive Programmes -10 conductor students Intensive Programmes -5 teachers from higher music education and 5 managers/producers from jazz festivals in Working Group 1. -5 teachers from higher music education in Working group 2-10 leaders/managers from higher music education institutions and jazz festivals in the steering group-Administrative and support staff in all partner institutions. The objectives of the project will be achieved through a combination of several activities, two working groups that will work with specific topics and several intensive programmes for students and teachers, exploring and developing new methodologies and new music for large jazz ensembles.The results of the project will be presented on the project's web site and in a conference at the end of the project. The musical result will also be presented by student ensembles participating in the project at five concerts at five different European jazz festivals.The consortium behind the project believes the project has the potential to lead to significant development of methods and content in jazz education at all educational levels in the partner institutions and in other higher music education institutions"