Graduate Level Music Education in the Context of the Digital Arts: A Practical Example

The music education system should be prepared to respond to the challenges of the new "information society" (to use a fashionable name) and the educational institutions should be responsible for training musicians for this new reality. Unfortunately the current situation does not give us any good expectation for it. In this article we present some thoughts on the current situation and ideas for new educational curricula, even though we are conscious of the difficulty and danger of it. It is impossible to have the necessary historical perspective to understand the artistic trends being developed and to decide what type of curriculum should be the most appropriate one for preparing the professionals that will be involved in these trends while creating new ones. But today's society cannot wait for us to have the right perspective and we should attempt to give some solutions even knowing that they will be temporary and that they will have to change as we go along. We should be prepared for constantly rethinking the problem and changing our solutions accordingly.
We start by presenting our view on the current situation of the education in music, the arts and the specific discipline of Computer Music, as the key areas for our discussion. We then describe the Master in Digital Arts offered by the Pompeu Fabra Univerity, as a practical example of the these views, and finally we include a commented list of educational institutions that have been used as references.