The Maurice Duruflé Academy of Music was founded with the goal of reshaping classical music education to better fit the needs of twenty-first century musicians.
We seek to be more than a classroom. We seek to be a complete musical environment; a place that brings together emerging and mature musicians, enabling them to grow and thrive.
Through comprehensive studies of the fundamentals of musical styles, musical philosophy, music theory, and more, students will be able to develop mature interpretations and approaches that are uniquely their own.
The Challenge
Each year, tens of thousands of students graduate from celebrated music conservatories throughout the world. While the output of these conservatories is renowned for their capability, in recent decades, they have reached a troubling level of artistic uniformity.
Philosophical exploration and technical mastery are needed to truly express a natural and well-developed artistic vision. And for many emerging career musicians, the traditional music school—if it teaches only the motions of received truth and idealistic perfection—is failing to reflect their ever-changing needs in the modern world.
Our Approach
The Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi once said:
“To copy the truth can be a good thing, but to invent the truth is better.”
Traditional music schools are fantastic at teaching students to copy well-established truths. The Duruflé Academy, in contrast, seeks to be a source of the understanding needed for music students to develop a mature artistic vision rooted in truths more fundamental, more essential.
We believe that thinking musicians are better musicians, and to that end, well-rounded music education should be built around teaching young musicians how to think about music. Traditional teaching methods of today largely revolve around teaching students how to execute the interpretation of the teacher. We aim to teach students how to develop their own mature and well-informed interpretations of their own.
The great musicians of the Enlightenment era all understood the core principles of philosophy, logic, rhetoric, and above all, art. We seek to bring these ideas back to the center stage in the music world so that musicians will not merely know what to do, but how to do it and why.
Maurice Duruflé Academy of Music 