VC LIVE | Cremona's Stauffer Center for Strings Official Opening Ceremony [WATCH NOW]

The school offers tuition-free Artist Diploma programs for highly talented young string soloists, string quartets, and concertmasters — who are about to embark on international careers

Housed in the spectacular 17th Century Palazzo Stradiotti building, elite-level students will be offered the unique opportunity to navigate their own post-graduate string performance education with additional exposure to musicological research, composition, violin making, music production, artist management, innovation, and technology courses.

The opening ceremony, presented today fOctober 1st, International Music Day, features special guests including Italy's Minister of Culture, Dario Franceschini, Stauffer Center for Strings professors Salvatore Accardo, Bruno Giuranna, Franco Petracchi, and the Quartetto di Cremona, and alumni Francesca Dego and Daniel Palmizio

The Stauffer Foundation and original Academy were founded in 1970 by Swiss philanthropist Walter Stauffer, with the core mission of providing one of the world’s best training programs for string musicians, traditional violin-making, and musicology — which has always remained steadfast.

Today marks the opening of the new Stauffer Center and the conservatory's shift to a newer progressive curriculum focused of not only further enhancing a player’s performance, but also giving its elite musicians a far broader perspective on what classical music is and what it can do.

"The Stauffer Center for Strings will take an extremely integrated approach to our student's training, and it is our goal to send our graduates into their professional careers armed with the tools they need not only to thrive in today’s new music industry, but to also be able to recognize and identify further ways of constantly improving upon it," new Stauffer Center for Strings Director General Paolo Petrocelli this week told The Violin Channel.

FRIDAY OCTOBER 1, 2021 | 5:30 AM (ET)

STAUFFER CENTER FOR STRINGS — CREMONA, ITALY

OFFICIAL OPENING CEREMONY

"Like all industries, music, and especially classical music, needs to adapt with the times in order to stay culturally relevant and to ensure that careers are sustainable," Paolo Petrocelli this week said.

"Now, the demands of classical musicians are higher than ever, and not necessarily just in terms of one’s musical and performance ability — performers also must be proficient in business. They must know how to utilize their resources to discover new and meaningful ways of engaging audiences and they need to learn how to record, and how to maintain relationships with presenters, and so much more," he said.