The two-year programme combines a personal study route with a shared curriculum. In your individual study route, you will take main subject lessons and receive personal coaching. You will have a personal budget for masterclasses and training, and each year you will write a personal study plan with your learning goals and research questions. In the shared part of the programme, you will work in the Performance Lab on concept development, stage presentation and audience engagement, directly linking your research to practice.
Programme structure: in year 1, you will deepen your technique and interpretation, explore new performance practices and lay the foundation for your research direction. In year 2, you will focus on production and presentation, expand your portfolio, collaborate with external coaches or partners where relevant, and complete your studies with a master’s project – a performative final work with a substantiated curatorial context and a clear research rationale.
In your individual study route, you will take your main subject lessons, delving deeper into your field while continuing to develop your musical knowledge and instrumental or vocal skills.
Within Free Space, you can use a small personal budget to choose your own workshops and masterclasses, or take additional lessons within the Academy of Music. You can also take part in bachelor- or Academy of Music-wide projects and classes, such as the string ensemble, band coaching or an ensemble week.
Every Tuesday, you will work in the Performance Lab on all aspects of live performance: stage presentation, theatricality, audience engagement, writing and concept development. You will develop, test and refine your ideas in short sprints. You will attend each other’s try-outs, give focused feedback and immediately apply what you learn in your next version. In this way, you learn with and from one another. The academic year is divided into blocks, each concluding with a public presentation.
Guest lecturers from the international professional field will work hands-on with you – not only to make music together, but to design meaningful experiences that are current, personal and for real audiences. You will learn to develop performances that fit the place and purpose, and to connect familiar repertoire with new forms and contexts.
Residency Project (years 1 and 2)
In both years, you will work in a residency with a leading ensemble or artist. Examples include:
- Nederlands Blazers Ensemble (NBE): students explored the NBE’s working methods and received musical and conceptual guidance, later developing a performance route through Zwolle.
- Ragazze Quartet: coaching focused on interdisciplinary performance, with results presented at September Me Festival.
- Past resident artists have included the Nederlands Kamerkoor and Holland Baroque.
Within Performance Lab, you will be encouraged to unite the traditional and the new and to integrate what is familiar into what is still unknown. You will gain stage experience, refine your artistic signature and learn to work with and for your audience.
Within Connecting the Dots you collaborate with master’s students from the ArtEZ Academy of Music in Arnhem.
The programme consists of a project week, several workshops and the Meet the Master days. The focus is on exchange, collaboration and connection: 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 2025, the main guest 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 Arnhem. Here, the focus is on performing, interdisciplinarity and making. In Zwolle, the programme places more emphasis on performance and curatorship.
In both variants, you are encouraged to make full use of the knowledge and teaching offered in both cities. This allows you to develop your own unique graduation profile within the ArtEZ Academy of Music.