IN.TUNE is the European University Alliance in the field of music and the arts. Bringing together eight higher education institutions across Europe, the alliance is developing intensive, long-term structural and strategic cooperation across all four missions of the higher arts education sector: education, research, innovation and service to society.
At its heart, IN.TUNE is a strategic approach to internationalisation. We are:
- Creating unique opportunities for students and teachers that no single institution could achieve alone.
- Improving ourselves through transnational cooperation to drive institutional transformation.
- Aligning focused, long-term collaboration with each partner’s needs and strategies.
- Developing innovative models and methodologies that can be reused across the sector, with potential to expand from music into other disciplines.
First achievements: a shared foundation for action
Eighteen months in, IN.TUNE has produced a first wave of practical outputs that lay the groundwork for deeper, more operational collaboration. Alliance-wide inventories and plans set a common direction for joint approaches to education provision, mobility, professional development, societal engagement, quality assurance and governance. Some examples – clustered around several practical themes – are:
Joint education and mobility. Three inventories were made to map the current landscape and remove avoidable friction in future:
- The Inventory of existing arrangements for mobility identifies how partners currently support student and staff mobility and where administrative or recognition issues arise—providing a baseline for streamlined processes and future joint formats.
- The Inventory of LMS and digital low-latency systems compares learning platforms and real-time audio/video tools, noting readiness levels and potential barriers — critical groundwork for cross-site teaching and ensemble work.
- The Inventory of cooperation areas for new educational formats collates proposals for joint modules, blended intensive programmes and online courses, weighing feasibility so pilots can become stable offers. Building on this, sixteen new joint formats were selected for development across the alliance, with the first already underway this autumn.
Societal engagement and professional development.
- In staff development and lifelong learning, the Plan for annual ‘Artist as Teacher’ courses sets a framework for training in pedagogy, artistic research methods, inclusion and social safety, assessment, and sustainable academic careers — aligned with IN.TUNE’s strategies across education, research, innovation and service to society. The Inventory of existing lifelong learning courses and a plan for new joint courses surveys current CPD provision and highlights opportunities and challenges for joint, profession-facing offers.
- A Comparative study on career skills and entrepreneurship reviews how programmes embed these elements, establishing common parameters for future development and the exchange of good practice.
- Finally, the Communication and Dissemination Plan sets strategies to share the alliance’s vision and outputs with peers, policymakers and the cultural sector — supporting uptake beyond the eight institutions.
Strategic foundations, governance and quality assurance. The Governance & Management Framework sets out how the alliance is run — with clear roles, decision-making, a partnership agreement, and monitoring and reporting. Complementing this, Plans for internal and external evaluation define how IN.TUNE monitors and enhances the quality and impact of alliance activities, closing the feedback loop from action to improvement.
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From planning to practice
Moving from inventories and plans to pilots and implementation across the network, recent activities show some examples of how the foundation translates into action across core dimensions:
- Innovative education in practice, with partners co-creating joint educational formats that model cross-border pedagogy, while testing recognition and workload solutions prepared in the planning phase.
- Research driving teaching through exchanges of experience and expertise —such as the Annual IN.TUNE Research in Education Event (AIRE) — inform curriculum and staff development, turning research outputs into concrete teaching and assessment practices.
- National dissemination events —such as the Belgrade programme hosted under the “Music in Socio-Cultural Turmoil” conference— support engaging society through arts, bringing alliance learning to broader stakeholder communities and feeding local insights back into alliance work.
Why this matters for the sector
IN.TUNE’s ambition is not only to strengthen eight institutions, but to prototype models of deep transnational cooperation that others can use. By documenting processes, templates and decision paths — in addition to publishing outputs — we aim to reduce the transaction costs of collaboration for the wider community of conservatoires and arts universities.
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