St. Cecilia's Conservatory of Music was founded in 2012 by Stephen Collins. A professional orchestral musician with over 30 years experience, he was privileged to learn from the best. His first violin lessons were with the esteemed Canadian pedagogue Ranald Shean in Edmonton. He studied viola at the University of Alberta with the founders of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Michael Bowie and Norman Neslon. Mr. Collins then returned to Ranald Shean to study the pedagogical principals of Ivan Galamian. He was subsequentlly invited by Czech violist Jaroslav Karlovsky to pursue a Master of Music degree at the University of Victoria. Karlovsky violist of the Prague String Quartet, Principal Violist with the Czech Philharmonic, and who performed the Bartok Viola Concerto over 50 times in Europe not long after it's composition, was highly influential in Mr. Collins artistic development. Since 1991, Mr. Collins has been performing with fine Canadian symphony orchestras including Victoria, Thunder Bay, Kitchener-Waterloo, London, and Windsor. He is currently Principal Viola with the International Symphony Orchestra.
With all of this privileged education, Mr. Collins is dedicated to enthusiastically passing on the highest quality music education. Our dream is to offer something more than just music lessons. Our aim is to inspire you to see music as a big part of life.
The Arts are not meant to be something simply tacked on to life! Music is especially interwoven into our life in very deep ways. Music can make you laugh or cry, it can make you dance, it can express your deepest love or your greatest loss. Consider what the ancient Greeks said, which reflects why music so deeply moves us:
"The stars tell us about how things are organized outside of ourselves, music tells us how things are organized inside of ourselves."
This day in age, it is common to hear young people talk about getting a B.A., a Bachelor of Arts degree at university. How many of these graduates even know what that means? The ancient Greeks talked about the Liberal Arts.
Well, in the ancient Greek education, there were 7 Liberal Arts. They were divided into two parts: The Trivium and the Quadrivium.
The Trivium was made up of Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic. So, you would learn the construction of language, how to use it persuasively, and then how to make your persuasive arguments stand up to scrutiny.
The Quadrivium was made up of Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, and Music. Look how incredibly beautiful that list is!!! How can you really have any one of those things without the other?
Music is proportion, math, geometry, and the very fabric of creation itself! When you have an MRI and ultrasound, that's the intersection of music, math, science, and life. Leonardo da Vinci sure understood that, and so did Pythagoras, Vitruvius, Michelangelo, and so many other great contributors to our culture. Music and art are part of who we are. Music deserves a prominent place in our education.
At St. Cecilia's Conservatory of Music, our goal is to light you on fire for music, so that you can better the lives of others with your rich expression.