Environmental Sustainability Guide For Enterprising Musicians

The Reina Sofía Music School, located in Madrid, is a centre of exceptional educational quality that offers a comprehensive and personalised education to an exquisite group of young classical music talents. As part of its education, the School offers more than 300 concerts a year, including symphonic and chamber music projects and a wide range of recitals. In this sense, it is both an educational centre and a cultural dynamo in the heart of the Spanish capital. The School is firmly committed to the Sustainable Development Goals from an educational, social and environmental point of view.

It is also a promoter of a paradigm shift in the status of the classical musician, who, traditionally, was limited to achieving excellence in performance without being required to hold a relevant position in the society in which he or she was immersed. Against an image of the musician as a passive subject of his time, the School, aware of the challenges he faces in a changing world with high rates of precariousness, created the Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation Programme in the 2016-2017 academic year. The Reina Sofía Music School sees the future professional classical musician as a creative entrepreneur aware of the need for a triple transition to a more environmental and socially sustainable music scene that is increasingly digitised.

As part of the dynamism expected of musicians in the 21st century, The School created a guide with tips for environmentally friendly artistic projects that will be first used in 2024 for its music entrepreneurship programme. It offers a series of steps to be followed by enterprising musicians with an environmental conscience; on the other hand, we consider that these guidelines point to basic issues for the music industry and that, if followed unanimously, they will achieve the goal of reducing the carbon footprint.

The guidebook was created with the support of MusicAIRE and published by the Digital Music Observatory, a decentralised prototype for a future European Music Observatory built within a Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Action project (Open Music Europe.)