The Peabody Institute is now collaborating with the National University of Singapore’s Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music (NUS) to offer a joint bachelor of music degree program that will start next year. It will be the first international undergraduate conservatory music program, giving students the ability to attend classes in both Baltimore and Singapore.
After their freshman year, students would have to audition or be chosen to participate in the program. “They would spend five semesters in their home institution and three in the visiting institution,” Director of the Peabody Institute Jeffrey Sharkey wrote in an e-mail to The News-Letter. “The program will start initially with composers who could benefit from learning the musical cultures of both hemispheres and respond well to diverse teaching styles.”
The schools came up with this idea as part of their second partnership agreement, which was signed in 2007. “The National University of Singapore (the parent university to our partner, Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music) has joint degrees with U.S. universities in other subjects and was very keen to create one in music,” Sharkey wrote.
Sharkey feels that the collaboration will work because of the close partnership that Peabody has with NUS. “It can only work because of the trust we've built together over the ten years of our ongoing partnership,” Sharkey said. “Yong Siew Toh was started by Peabody and used the Peabody curriculum as well as significant Peabody alumni to create the new conservatory.”
He also thinks that collaborating with NUS will greatly benefit the music education students receive. “The selected students will have the opportunity to gain from studying in one another's unique cultures,” he wrote. “U.S.-based students would benefit from the smaller, intensive environment of Yong Siew Toh as well as experience the embrace of music and culture throughout Asia.
Singapore-based students would gain from the added breadth of the larger Peabody and experience the music traditions of North America.”
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