President's Message

Dr. Peter Simon, President

Over the past decade, The Royal Conservatory has set in motion a series of far-reaching and evolutionary changes in the role of arts organizations and their ability to affect society.

Galvanized by scientific research that showed the vital importance of music and the arts in developing the brain, we resolved to find new ways to infuse music and arts into the fabric of every young person's life. The result was a ground-breaking program called Learning Through the Arts which is now in over 300 schools in Canada, and dozens more around the world. Teachers and students in LTTA schools use the arts in a systematic way to explore, construct, test and apply new knowledge across the curriculum.

In the past few years, we have also become a leader in preparing teachers to advance the development of pre-school aged children through music. Today, The Royal Conservatory is one of a handful of institutions in the world that offers a certification program in the teaching of early childhood music education.

More recently, we created new ways for students to learn and expand their intelligence and creativity via new technology. We have partnered with Acadia University, Yamaha Canada, and CANARIE in a project with worldwide implications for distance learning: MusicPath. This remarkable technology allows a gifted student living anywhere in the world to receive life-altering training from a master teacher at the Conservatory.

After a decade of hard work and tangible progress in realizing our dreams, the Conservatory has completed the construction of a new facility designed especially for the new and vibrant institution we have become. Last year our Building National Dreams Campaign had extraordinary success, reaching 76 per cent of its target through support from government, corporations, foundations and individual donors.

While music remains the core of our work - embodied in an acoustically and visually resplendent new concert hall and the excellence of The Royal Conservatory School, The Glenn Gould School and the Young Artists Performance Academy - our new home will also provide dazzling multimedia capabilities needed to develop dynamic new training programs for all.

Anchored in the spectacular new TELUS Centre for Performance and Learning, located in the heart of Toronto's finest cultural precinct, our programs reach out even further across a remarkable mix of diverse Canadian communities to countries around the world.

Over the past year, we continued to benefit from the contributions of our Board of Directors, our National Advisory Board, our Capital Campaign Cabinet, our Foundation, and our management team and employees. Their enthusiasm and hard work has made this a tremendous year of progress for The Royal Conservatory.

We are immensely grateful to our supporters for helping us to move forward to create a society in which the arts are embraced by all citizens as catalysts for achievement, pathways to self-exploration and bridges to mutual understanding.