‘Tradition is the passing of the flame, not the worshipping of the ashes.’

This was how the Austrian composer-conductor Gustav Mahler referred to an animated speech by the French politician Jean Jaurès. For the passionate team of teachers at the Ghent Conservatory, this attitude is self-evident. Studying classical music in Ghent is a conscious and meaningful choice.

Flanders’ preeminent student city has a vivacious music culture, internationally recognized as a Unesco City of Music. Quiet calm and intimacy go hand in hand with an effervescent, shimmering cultural life, to which KASK & Conservatorium is a major contributor.

With an attentive, caring ear for maintaining essential musical and technical excellence and an open and critical view of what lives and moves in the world, our teaching staff guide students towards becoming self-reliant and autonomous artists. As experienced and sensitive musicians, they draw on their own rich artistic practices as soloists and chamber musicians in renowned orchestras and ensembles at home and abroad, and as composers for film, theatre and the concert stage. They readily share their knowledge and international network with our up-and-coming talent.

The core of the programme is musical practice. Above all, students learn to make music, as soloists and chamber musicians, as well as in orchestral and opera productions (together with professional musicians from the Flanders Symphony Orchestra, B’Rock Orchestra and more).

The presence of both a master of (historical) instrument building and a lively composition class contributes to an open climate where there are no boundaries to creative cooperation.

A widely varied range of theoretical frameworks across all the arts disciplines means that students become well-informed musicians for whom creation and performance are inseparable.

Together with a large group of international students in our English Master’s programme, students exchange experiences on an everyday basis. This happens both in our basic programme and in the European International Master in Composition for Screen, or InMICS (together with the conservatories of Lyon, Bologna and Montreal), as well as in the unique Advanced Master programme in contemporary music in collaboration with Ictus and SPECTRA.

Within the fertile breeding ground formed by KASK & Conservatorium, as a single school of arts, classical musicians work together with jazz and pop musicians, film and theatre makers, visual artists, designers and so on, or in short, the many cross-pollinations that characterize today’s music working field.

Finally, the Educational Master in Music and Performing Arts prepares students to pass on the torch, both in education and in social and artistic projects.

With all this, together with our students, the Royal Conservatory of the School of Arts opens and develops a wide range of potential trajectories and encourages students to discover their voices in their own personal projects, ready for the world.