The 2025 AEC Pop & Jazz Platform will take place in Pamplona, Spain on 27 February – 2 March 2025. The event will be hosted by Conservatorio Superior de Música de Navarra (CSMN), one of the very first higher music education institutions in Spain to offer tuition in jazz.

The CSMN has spent more than 150 years as a centre related to classical Western music. Since the beginning of this century, it has been open to jazz education, which is why you are invited to celebrate its first quarter century in 2025. This very year also marks the 15th anniversary of CSMN’s new and modern building.

Pamplona – or Iruña in Basque – is the capital of Navarre province. The city is full of history and has a high socioeconomic and cultural level. There is a wide hotel and gastronomic offerings and excellent transport services, thanks to its airport and rail connections with the main Spanish cities (Madrid, Barcelona, ao.).

Having received very good feedback on the organisation and the programme of the Odense Meeting, the PJP Working Group has decided to continue including participatory workshops in the programming. All the longer-established elements of the Meetings such as keynote speeches, contributions from the community in the form of Open Floor presentations, and various opportunities for networking are included as well.

Event theme

The theme for the 2025 edition of the PJP Meeting is Mother Tongue: European Identities in Heritage, Pedagogy, and Repertoire. With this, the host institution and the PJP Working Group want to create a discussion about how our native languages on the one hand, and the dominance of the English language in Western popular culture on the other, shape our identities and affect our choices of repertoire, the way music is taught and learned in our institutions, and the state of musical traditions and indigenous forms of music in our countries.

Call for Contributions

To tap into the talent of the PJP community, we are launching two calls for contributions:

Call for Workshops

We are looking for proposals for practical workshops e.g. under the following topics:

  • The impact of language on musical expression, teaching and learning
  • Language and choice of repertoire
  • Questions concerning tradition vs. innovation
  • Pedagogical strategies for nurturing traditional and indigenous music forms
  • Music and identity
  • The evolving role(s) of the teacher in Higher Music Education
  • Ways and styles of learning in music
  • Teaching and learning methods
  • Instrument- and/or genre-specific issues
  • Improvisation

The above list is exemplary but connected to the themes of the Meeting.

When applying for workshops, please provide a clear description of the activities that will take place during the session, including details about the interactive components. The workshops should be interactional – at least to some extent. Proposals from students are also highly welcome, so please forward the call to your master’s students!

Each workshop will be max. 60 mins. in duration, and include at least 15 mins. of Q&A. Please time your session beforehand! There will be several workshops running in parallel, so you do not have to address the whole community at once. Note that there will be dozens of participants in each workshop, so every single attendee may not be involved in the activities in a hands-on manner.

Your proposal for a workshop should contain max. 300 words. Please attach a short biography of yourself to the proposal. The proposal should be sent by 25 October by email to PJP WG Coordinator Beatriz Laborda, beatrizlaborda@aec-music.eu

Call for Open Floor Sessions

The PJP Working Group invites colleagues from AEC institutions to contribute to the programme by submitting proposals for a 30-minute session (max. 20 mins. presentation + min. 10 mins. discussion). You are invited to send a max. 300 words proposal of presentation and discussion, preferably related, but not limited, to the themes stated in the Call for Workshops, plus:

  • Curriculum design and implementation
  • Skills (musicians’, music educators’ etc.)
  • Sustainability, e.g. Sustainable musicianship, Artistic sustainability, Physical/mental sustainability  (Musicians’s health)

Students are also encouraged to send proposals!

Please attach a short biography of yourself to the proposal. The proposal should be sent by 25 October by email to PJP WG Coordinator Beatriz Laborda, beatrizlaborda@aec-music.eu. The selected proposals will be included in the PJP Open Floor session.

All selections for both the Workshops and the Open Floor sessions will be announced by 8 November.

AEC is very much looking forward to seeing you all in Pamplona!