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The University of Music Karlsruhe is an artistic and scientific institution responsible for a diverse musical and cultural life, preparing its students for professions in the fields of art, science, and music education. The highest artistic quality, differentiated thinking about music, and socially responsible action are the university's twin aspirations and goals. Artists who have proven themselves on the world stage, including informed musicians, music teachers, and researchers committed to art, are equally the focus for training.
We see ourselves as responsible for our nation and its future and mutually appreciate our good fortunate to work in an internationally sought-after and renowned training site. We take responsibility for educating nationally and internationally competitive, artistically independent, scientific and educational personalities who are also socially accessible individuals prepared to face challenges confidently and critically.
Training at the highest level is the University of Music Karlsruhe’s conscious goal. We achieve this with lecturers of international standing, intensive support of our students in their wide-rangingly different sensibilities, and regular evaluation as well as constant improvement of all teaching and administrative processes. Scientific work at the University of Music Karlsruhe is committed to the principles and values of freedom of research in a variety of topics and methods. It is faithful to the fundamentals of good scientific practice.
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The University of Music Karlsruhe strongly opposes discrimination and stands for the promotion of diversity in ethnic and cultural origin as well as age, gender, sexual orientation, religion and belief. All of these categories provide enrichment for us in our daily interactions. Equality for all genders is also a matter of course for us.
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The University of Music Karlsruhe is committed to the European music tradition, while at the same time embracing international and cosmopolitan approaches. We advance our carefully selected 640 students from around 50 nations through a wide range of courses, cultural enrichment, encounters with eminent personalities in the arts and sciences, and international partnerships. This is also done as part of our numerous master classes, through diverse suggestions for talking about music and sharing music-making, with multiple opportunities for self-evaluation and a unified mutual respect. Ensemble music-making, especially chamber music, are essential for us. Curricula and study time are appropriately coordinated. We respect that artistic development always means personal development, and may encounter occasional impasses or impediments.
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Musical education demonstrably promotes creativity, the ability to concentrate, social competence, and cognitive skills. Those who omit early musical influence upon children gamble away the future of our country. All culturally active institutions have a high level of responsibility in this matter, especially for our youngest national talent. Only through early, widespread musical support can superior talents be identified. Our current and future cultural lives benefit from such young people as well as an understanding, knowledgeable audience and large-scale personalities who shape musical experience. Our commitment today will decide how our culture will be represented tomorrow. The University of Music Karlsruhe faces up to this responsibility.
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The University of Music Karlsruhe has always been very open to innovation. Our roots in the European musical tradition shape our profile as well as future-oriented thinking and corresponding engagement with new music as a creative expression of our time. Because as the saying goes, we can only recognize what is new by knowing what is old. Only by experiencing the new does the old become fully apparent.
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The University of Music Karlsruhe has an employment-related orientation. Courses offered are designed to a large extent to fit the needs of the market and constantly evolving professional fields. Yet we follow in our training, committed to art as an expression of a humane view of people, not just to adhere to the zeitgeist, but also work in resistance to contemporary fashions. In this way, we develop innovative traditions to think about, mediate, and preserve for future generations.
Given societal changes, we are developing new forms of such mediation and expression in concerts and musical theater, in music journalism as well as significant involvement in music informatics.
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The Marburg-born philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) has described how play and seriousness unite in art through joie de vivre and rules. Gadamer, long a mainstay at the University of Heidelberg, argued that what is played in the game of art is not a substitute or dream world in which we forget ourselves. Instead, the game of art is a mirror that appears repeatedly before us through the millennia, in which we see ourselves - often unexpectedly or in alien form - how we are, how we could be, and “how it is about us,” as Gadamer’s hermeneutics, the branch of knowledge that deals with interpretation, explains it. This is where our destiny as a university of art and music, our social role and meaning, reside. Such an understanding of art is based on both responsibility and joy in linking future generations to one another.