Each year, in consultation with your mentor, you will write a personal study plan in which you formulate your learning goals, projects and research questions. You will have many options both within and outside the programme. You will decide which classes you take, which projects or productions you develop, and how you use your personal budget. You are in charge of your own development and responsible for your progress with plenty of freedom. The only conditions are that you meet the required number of credits and that your components are artistically in line with your goals.
For your individual route, you will have the freedom to design your own path of study. This may centre around your instrument or voice, or from conceptual or interdisciplinary work. You will select the lessons, modules, coaches and projects that best match your practice. Whether you would like to develop your own performance format, focus on composition, or work with multimedia or text, you have the freedom to make the artistic choices that contribute to your individual growth.
A proactive attitude and a natural curiosity are essential. We expect you to take the initiative in making connections and starting collaborations, both within and beyond ArtEZ.
In the Performance Lab you work together with fellow students from the Master of Music in Arnhem. You mainly work in monthly blocks of a few consecutive days, where you’re introduced to a thematic mix of theory and practical tools for interdisciplinary work. This can include concept development, co-creation, performativity, and the dramaturgy of other disciplines. You’re taught by inspiring guest lecturers.
You can then use this knowledge and these skills in your own productions and projects within your individual pathway. Research and your personal interests play a central role here.
Halfway through each year, there’s also an interdisciplinary project week called GrasEd, where you collaborate with master’s students from other art disciplines within ArtEZ in Arnhem and Zwolle, such as Critical Fashion Practices, Interior Architecture, Architecture, and Illustration Based Narrative.
Within Connecting the Dots you collaborate with master’s students from the ArtEZ Academy of Music in Zwolle. The programme consists of a project week, the so-called Meet the Master days, and for year 1 also the Artistic Statement module. Exchange, collaboration and connection are central: you explore other fields of practice and benefit from working with musicians who, like you, are developing their own artistic practice.
The theme and working method of the project week are determined collectively each year.
In 2026 the projectweek focuses on the question: can reframing music performance as ritual open new spaces for creative discovery? Cellist and maker Maya Fridman teams up with neuroscientist and former Olympic speed skater Beorn Nijenhuis to explore the connection between ritual, performance, and embodied cognition.
The main guest in 2025 was director and choreographer Martin Buttler. Students created a mini festival featuring site-specific performances, guided and inspired by coaches specialising in text, improvisation, sound & space and graphic scores.
Another example was the theme moving images in 2022/2023. Guest lecturer and composer Jacob ter Veldhuis (Jacob TV) immersed the group for three days in a vivid world of grooving boombox compositions based on speech samples, colourful orchestral works and the reality opera THE NEWS. Working in teams, students developed their own concepts with coaching from various disciplines. The week concluded with a performance at Focus Filmtheater Arnhem.
You can also follow the Master of Music in Zwolle. There, the programme focuses more on performance and curatorship. In Arnhem, the emphasis is on performing, interdisciplinarity and making.
In both variants, you are encouraged to make full use of the knowledge and teaching offered in both cities. In this way, you can develop your own unique graduation profile within the ArtEZ Academy of Music.