The Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership Project INTERMusic, coordinated by the Conservatorio “Giuseppe Verdi” di Milano” has now completed 2/3 of its implementation phase. The blended courses created during the project are now ready for actual experimentation by partner institutions between January and March.
On 9 October the first online session of the Composition with Chinese Instruments course took place within the frame of the INTERMusic project. Students from Milan Conservatory and Lithuanian Music and Theatre Academy in Vilnius (LMTA) have met a group of traditional Chinese instruments players from the Confucius Institute at the Royal Danish Academy of Music (RDAM) in Copenhagen: a great all-women team, with their teacher, Professor Tuan Hao Tan. During a two-hour lesson, the performers have introduced the instruments (pipa, guzheng, yangqin, guqin, zhongruan, erhu), showing some technical possibilities; then they have given a first reading of the drafts uploaded by the composers on the INTERMusic platform, discussing with them on further developments, correcting the unavoidable mistakes and answering the questions.
On 4 November, the second online session of the course on Composition for Traditional Chinese Instruments was held, through the three-point connection Copenhagen-Milan-Vilnius. During this session the pieces of the selected Composition students from the Milan Conservatory and the Vilnius LMTA started to take shape under the skilled hands of the musicians of the Confucius Institute at the RDAM in Copenhagen. A three-hour full immersion took place, during which the nine pieces of the composers (now half completed) have been rehearsed discussing problems and technical solutions, imagining possible developments. It was a challenging session for both the composers and the performers: for the former, who are called to deal with little-known instruments and performing technics; for the latter, called to enter in a different musical culture and to face sometimes very demanding passages. In the next phase the pieces will be completed and two of them will be selected for the performance at the Pulsar Festival on 10 March 2020 in Copenhagen.
The first project results have been disseminated during the multiplier events that took place at the AEC Annual Meeting for International Relations Coordinators in Prague on 21st September and at the AEC Annual Congress and General Assembly in Turin on 8th November.
The next multiplier event of the project will take place in April at the Milan Conservatory and it will feature the launch of the idea of a shared platform for institutions interested in digitisation.
