Study

You all seek an excellent professional musical education. Before coming to the school, many of you have been struggling with the often-conflicting demands of general secondary education and your musical work. It is no secret that being a classical musician at the highest level and doing very well at secondary school is a combined challenge that requires you to develop crucial qualities at an early age: autonomy, rigour, consistency, focus, commitment, self-awareness, self-discipline and excellent organizational skills. The vast majority of you have the desire to do really well academically and understand how fundamental education is. As Maxim Vengerov aptly puts it, “the unceasing ambition to know and understand more are the core values underpinning quality musical education”. 

As educators, our energies are focused on supporting your efforts to know and understand more, to be the best of yourselves, on accompanying you and helping you to develop the qualities you need to succeed and crucially, helping you not only to learn but to love to learn: it is undeniable that you need to be rigorous, self-disciplined and organized, but the best education is about much more than this, it is about developing outstanding craftmanship and strength with passion, emotional depth and creative imagination, qualities that if developed, will stay with you and enable you to live fulfilled artistic lives.  The intensive work that takes place in the classroom is training you to become independent-minded, critical thinkers and seekers of knowledge, speakers of several languages, to develop a love of science, history, literature, whatever path you choose to go down. 

I am grateful every day for the skill and commitment of the teachers at Musica Mundi School and for your creative energy, intellectual curiosity and resilience. It is a winning combination. 

Of course learning goes far beyond the classroom. As a boarding school, we share with parents the responsibility for helping you to develop the knowledge and skills you need for everyday life: the ability to live together as a community, to manage the challenges of social media and screen use, to eat healthily, to develop good sleep behaviours, to deal with everyday problems. At Musica Mundi, we aim to live and work together in an atmosphere of mutual respect, compassion and tolerance, to create a harmony which is not only reflected in music but in people’s lives. And whilst as humans, we often fall short of our aims, it is important to know that this is what we strive for. 

On behalf of all the teachers at Musica Mundi, I wish you all an exciting, creative, fruitful, and happy school year.

Steffi Petch, Academic Director