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.

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 ‘Modernising European Higher Music Education through Improvisation - METRIC’ project wants to contribute to improving the employability of future music graduates through the artistic, pedagogical and entrepreneurial development of higher music education studies in the area of improvisation as a response to the rapidly changing employment situation in the music profession. In performance curricula of higher music education institutions all over the world, improvisation training is increasingly seen as a crucial component because of the following reasons: - Changes in the role of music in society lead to rapid developments in the music profession. The increased interest in a variety of musical styles by music listeners and a decrease of state support to arts generally are characterise these developments. The future music profession needs musicians that are flexible in working methods, musical styles and able to work in different professional contexts. Improvisation is seen as a significant skill in the music profession, giving the musicians better opportunities for finding jobs in a wider spectrum of music styles and contexts as artists, teachers and community musicians. - Improvisation is seen as a crucial pedagogical tool for the training of transversal skills, which are fundamental for future musicians. Reflective attitude, peer-learning and team working are basic principles for improvisation practice and these are exactly the skills that will support the musicians to prepare themselves to be reflective participants in their portfolio careers. Therefore improvisation is a vital tool for modernizing higher education in the area of classical music. To support this, strong courses on improvisation need to be developed in higher music education institutions. The project brought together students, teachers and leading experts from different musical backgrounds in 14 European higher music education institutions to develop new and effective approaches and methods on the teaching of improvisation, both from an artistic and pedagogical as well as a professional integration point of view. The teaching staff was updated or re-trained with information on innovative teaching and learning methods, leading to higher quality teaching. This resulted in an increased awareness and understanding of the potential of improvisation in the participating institutions and, through a set of targeted dissemination activities, the higher music education sector at large. Eventually, this will lead to improved employment opportunities for future music students. The project implemented the following activities: 1. A series of working group meetings twice a year to develop intellectual outputs in the form of new teaching and learning (online), and assessment methodologies in improvisation. 2. The organisation of 4 Intensive Study Programmes (ISPs) where students and teachers met around specific themes. The role of these ISPs was be central to the developmental function of the project, as they further helped develop and test the intellectual outputs developed in the working groups. 3. A joint staff training event for teachers took place in the first year of the project where different groups of teachers addressed new teaching and learning (online) methodologies and assessment approaches and compared international standards of educational and artistic outcomes. Teaching staff was also trained to become international external examiners for assessments in improvisation. 4. The development of joint European Modules in Improvisation through a series of working group meetings. These joint European Modules ensured that the expertise available in the partner institutions would be pooled into a programme of the highest educational and artistic quality, and provide future sustainability to the activities through a structured future use of ERASMUS+ KA1 funding. 5. A Final Conference to disseminate the project results to a wider audience of interest groups and to enhance the sustainability of the project results. The participant institutions are all leading music higher education institutions in Europe, making the impact of the project most notable.Through the involvement of the European Association of Conservatoires (AEC) representing around 300 institutions worldwide, the progress and results of the partnership was and is being widely disseminated as a model of curricular innovation through cross-border cooperation and expected to have a wide impact on the higher music education sector at large.The project created a stronger network of professionals in a higher music education sector, making it possible to implement new approaches to music teaching and learning through improvisation. The project developments enhance the institutionalisation of the participating institutions and the developed intellectual outputs are public and accessible to anyone interested in the developments of improvisation teaching/leanring.

"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"

"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"