Conférence Romande
On December 1, music school directors from the French-speaking cantons gathered for the Conférence Romande. The event was hosted by the Conservatoire de Fribourg, a cantonal music school with over 40 teaching locations and around 4,000 students.
"This Exchange is very valuable for us as the only music school in the canton," says Nils Perrot, member of the school management, "It is an opportunity for us to get to know other music schools and circumstances."
The input from Richard-Emmanuel Eastes from the HES-SO provided further education. Around a year after ChatGPT and other generative AI emerged, he drew an initial conclusion. "How many of you have already tried ChatGPT?" he asked at the start. Almost all hands went up in the air. When asked how many of the participants regularly use generative AI tools in their everyday lives, a third answered yes. Eastes demonstrated conversations with ChatGPT, created images and showed how AI is also constantly improving in terms of music. "ChatGPT is not Wikipedia, it does not collect knowledge," he emphasized, "It is only interested in rules and probabilities." He made this clear in concrete terms: he convinced ChatGPT that in the key of D major there were three crosses instead of the correct two, whereupon the AI apologized and agreed with him. However, ChatGPT is very helpful as an assistant: it summarizes long texts, serves as a source of ideas, brings e-mails into shape, and much more.
Philippe Müller then provided information from the association. This included an outlook: in 2025, the Swiss Association of Music Schools will celebrate its 50th anniversary with a kind of Tour de Suisse, in collaboration with the Pestalozzi Children's Village Foundation's PowerUp Radio. The Young Talents Music funding program and its status in the individual cantons was also the subject of lively discussion.
Finally, the future of the Conférence Romande was also on the agenda. At least at the organizational level, there will be changes from 2024, as the The decision was made at the 11/24 delegates' meeting to no longer organize regional conferences on a top-down basis, but rather according to the bottom-up principle. This means that the VMS will no longer organize cross-cantonal conferences itself, but will be happy to support them if the need arises. The comments made by those present clearly showed that this need exists in French-speaking Switzerland. Representatives of the canton of Vaud agreed to take over the organization of the Conférence Romande 2024.
Pictures: Anicia Kohler
