40th edition International Higher Masterclasses
july 24th - august 7th, 2010
The New Siena Jazz Summer Workshops: a useful experience for young professionals.
The new teaching structure of the International Summer Courses of the Siena Jazz Foundation represents a milestone for our institution, together with the other important addition to our activities, the biennial courses of higher education whose first cycle started in 2008 and ended in 2010 with the name of “InJaM – International Jazz Master in Improvisation Techniques”. Like InJaM, the new “Siena Jazz Summer Workshops” will have a faculty composed half of Italian and half of foreign instructors, and the workshops will be open only to the more expert among the young jazz musicians, in practice those who used to be the best second level and the third level students under the old system.
The number of students will be less than half of what it was before, and the courses will be open to a maximum of 120 young musicians already able to play in ensemble.
So each student will be supported more closely, reducing the total number of courses but allowing better quality and higher number of hours for the subjects selected for the finishing courses.
We wanted to create intensive Master courses competing with the best in the field, on the same international quality level of the Master recently promoted in the winter by Siena Jazz.
This also with the purpose of showcasing in the world the didactic quality of the Italian higher education, confirming the vocation of Siena Jazz Foundation to keep its activities at a level of absolute excellence.
So the new didactical organisation will be focused on the Instrument and on the Ensemble Classes, with Jazz History and Esthetic and Form Analysis as the only theoretical subjects included in the program; their content will be richer and they will be aimed to have immediate practical utility in the Ensemble classes.
The young musicians will then attend every day, for the first six days, two instrument classes with two different teachers (one Italian and one International) and two combo classes, again with two different teachers (one Italian and one International) besides the Jazz History course.
The same structure will be repeated in the second period of six days of lessons with Form Analysis instead of Jazz History so that at the end each student will receive stimulus and information from four different instrument teachers, from four different teachers for the combo playing and from two teachers of theoretical subjects.
