The Virtual Conservatory- Mission

With the foundation of the Paris Conservatory at the dawn of the nineteenth century, musical instruction entered a new age. Music began to be taught not individually, as before, but in the classroom. As music training was broken down into separate but coordinated component disciplines, new instructional methods and materials were devised to realize the vast new pedagogical potential thus opened up.

With the advent of multimedia computer technology at the dawn of the twenty-first century, musical instruction is once again poised to enter a new age. The primary mission of the Virtual Conservatory is to exploit the grand potential of this technology by creating cutting-edge multimedia textbooks for music theory and aural skills, thereby advancing the cause of music education as elementally as did the pioneers of classroom instruction in music two centuries ago.

The Paris Conservatory was the proud flagship of the European conservatory movement, which swept through Europe during the nineteenth century and fundamentally influenced collegiate music training throughout the Western Hemisphere in the twentieth century. A principal aim of this movement was to "conserve" (or preserve and maintain) musical tradition, in part by making it accessible to a broader population. Hence the movement represented a fortunate blend of progressive methods and traditional values. In a similar spirit, a secondary mission of the Virtual Conservatory is to preserve what is good about instructional traditions in music theory and aural skills, while applying novel methods and materials made practicable by the new technology in order to bring musical understanding to a still broader population. In so doing, may the resplendent tradition of European art music, a treasure trove of high cultural achievement that is our common heritage, be all the better preserved.