Exchange Talk – Celia Duffy – Three questions about the (music) conservatoire

Celia Duffy has been engaged in innovation in specialist higher music education for the past two decades or so. Recently she was part of the AEC’s Creative Europe-funded Artemis project on curriculum innovation. This talk is based on three fundamental questions

· what is our function in society?

· who are our students?

· what should be in our curriculum?

These questions (and quite a few follow-ups) are posed against the background of major shifts across the sector revealed by Artemis in the wake of the influential article Musicians as “Makers in Society”: A Conceptual Foundation for Contemporary Professional Higher Music Education, Gaunt, Duffy, et al (2021).

Professor Celia Duffy is the Senior Fellow in Knowledge Exchange at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. As the first Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange at the RCS she played a key role in the conservatoire’s development as a research institution and in the major reform of its undergraduate curriculum.

As a member of the recent European-funded Artemis project working group on capacity building for curricular innovation, one focus of her current work is the need for evolution and change in higher music education to respond to rapidly changing needs in society.