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Classical technique in the world of pop and fusion

Saint Louis College of Music and its teacher Maestro Maurizio Colonna have partnered with Melissa Bassi High School in Naples, expanding opportunities for children to approach academic music studies.

Classical technique in the world of pop and fusion is the theme of the workshop held by M° Maurizio Colonna: three meetings on a monthly basis, led by M° Colonna, at the Melissa Bassi High School premises, which, as exclusive promoter together with Saint Louis, in addition to hosting the project at its own premises, also undertakes to host students from other high schools in the Campania region for a maximum of 30 participants.

Meetings with high school students will be held in November 2024, January and February 2025, during Saturday mornings for a maximum of 2 hours and 30 minutes each.

This will be followed by three afternoon meetings of four hours each always held at the Melissa Bassi headquarters on the same dates as the above meetings, also aimed at an external audience.

To find out how to participate in the afternoon meetings, aimed at high school students from all over Italy, fill out the form below

La tecnica classica nel mondo del pop e delle fusion

The workshop program

In the training of a young musician, in addition to sharing the traditional academic path, there emerges today the need to discover what has influenced and changed the concept of “making music” in recent decades.

Discovering, through one’s classical dimension, other genres of music, exploring their diversities and similarities, even through simple technological supports, is surely a necessity not only for music, outlining a new figure of the so-called contemporary classical musician.

In the educational journey of a young instrument student, who also incorporates the use of classical technique to explore pop, fusion, and other creative areas into his or her curriculum, it becomes essential to identify two specific areas:

  • An area of instrumental practice,
    in which with one’s instrument one gradually acquires the various technical-instrumental skills that incorporate the ability to harmonize, improvise, and naturalize a stylistic approach involving specific interpretive aptitudes;
  • a ‘theoretical area,
    in which you explain what you have studied and produced with your instrument.

Pop fusion, all of this can be developed within an entire school year or a different period (e.g., quarterly period), with the intention of creating an initial instrumental dimension of a propaedeutic nature, to be followed by a subsequent in-depth phase.

The goals to be achieved are as follows:

  • be able, using classical technique, to understand the specifics of non-classical literature, which thus becomes familiar and integrated within the general dimension (targeted technical-instrumental exercises, also related to the interpretive approach in the various styles, are included in the curriculum);
  • develop the student’s creative abilities in the area of simple harmonization and improvisation, thus recovering a “habit” present in previous centuries and which in more recent times the traditional classical world has lost (in the popular imagination improvisation is mistakenly considered to be the heritage only of Jazz, Pop, Rock and other non-classical areas);
  • succeed, through chamber music experiences, to share a new “sound” in which acoustic and electric instrumentalists can, playing together, explore new timbral-expressive realities;
  • create the preconditions for hypothesizing a new figure of the classical musician who does not just play through the reading of a musical score but interacts with it and himself becomes the creative protagonist of his performances.
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