Vak: Artistic Development 1 credits: 15

The Artistic Development course is all about exploring and developing your own artistic voice in creating and producing musical/artistic concepts. For this, you receive practice orientated coaching from the technical, creative, and artistic perspective, as well as the perspective of engagement. Coaches use an innovative approach designed to train flexible and professional musicians, who are able to connect their artistic skills to changing environments and situations.  

The aims of the Artistic Development course are: 
• To build a wide range of approaches for creating and shaping musical concepts. 
• To strengthen your performance and production skills to realise your ideas 
• To develop your own artistic voice and identity as a music professional 

To do this, you learn: 
• How to explore and apply a range of approaches to developing musical ideas, and to shape your own creative process. 
• How to innovate your practice, critically reflect on your creative process, and evaluate how your work relates to listeners and its broader context.
• How to identify and further develop the musical and technical skills that best support your artistic direction. 

Students from all directions have individual and/or group lessons on their instrument. In addition, the course contains activities that are related to the direction of choice. \
Classical students can form chamber music ensembles and receive coaching on request.
Jazz students work within a ‘lab band’ and a master’s ensemble.
NAIP students will partake in a series of LAB sessions, the content of which feeds directly into our three intensive context-based-learning projects.
The course also offers Master classes by various international professionals that are open for all students.

All Master students take part in the project Artistic Synthesis. In this project, students create a cross-genre, interdisciplinary performance by working together in groups, sharing their ideas, expertise and learning from one another. This fosters innovation, cross-pollination, and results in unique and unexpected performances. Expert instrumentalists and interdisciplinary artists coach the groups as they develop their performance. The first semester focuses on building co-creative skills and ideas through workshops and group sessions.