Magister Musicae

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Magister Musicae[1] is an internet portal which hosts a digital catalogue of more that 3,000 hours of music classes, given by more than 200 of the world’s most renowned musicians.

The project is promoted by Paloma O`Shea, who is president and founder of the Fundación Albéniz. The aim is to preserve the classes that take place each day at the Reina Sofía Music School (Escuela Superior de Música Reina Sofía) and make them accessible to a wider audience.

In the year 2000, the Spanish Ministry for Science and Technology supported the project with a considerable donation under the aegis of the PROFIT programme. The resulting three years of research and development which focused on the digitalization, cataloguing, compression and high-quality broadcasting of the videos on the internet, gave rise to HTCMedia, a tool which manages large quantities of video information. This has been the cornerstone of the creation of Magister Musicae.

The master classes are recorded in the music schools. These lessons are scrupulously analyzed by music specialists, catalogued by work and by movement, then broken down into teaching units of no more than six minutes’ duration. This system of classification allows the visitor to the site to go directly to the section of the class that is of interest, and to be able to link with a number of classes given by various teachers.

The scale and ambition of the project led, in 2004, to six of the principal conservatoires and music schools joining Magister Musicae, through the European Harmos project. It offered access to their teachers and enhanced Magister Musicae’s international profile.

• The Royal College of Music in London
• The Koninklijk Conservatorium in Brussels
• The Staatliche Musikhochschule in Stuttgart
• The Escuela Superior de Música do Porto in Oporto
• The Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya in Barcelona
• The Lithuanian Academy of Music in Vilnius
• The European Association of Conservatoires.

The project received the financial backing of the European Commission, who called it “the model project which impacts on the policies of the Union”. The following are amongst the more notable participants in the project:

• András Schiff
• Zakhar Bron
• Teresa Berganza
• Bruno Canino
• Silvia Marcovici
• Tom Krause
• Natalia Gutman
• Gérard Caussé
• David Geringas
• Veronica Hagen
• Lorin Maazel
• Vitaly Margulis
• Zubin Mehta
• Vladimir Ashkenazy

[edit] References

• Albéniz Foundation
• Magister Musicae