In the academic year of 1993/1994, ANSO inaugurated in Portugal the Bachelor Degree in Instrument Performance for Orchestra and Orchestral Conducting courses. At the time it was an innovative proposal, because it distinguished the specific performance of each musician within the orchestra, and simultaneously provided all students with the experience of playing in public and served the learning purposes for young conductors in front of a privileged training instrument, a true orchestra, the Metropolitan Academic Orchestra (OAM). Even today, this is a rare opportunity in the international context.

After five years, ANSO started to grant the Bachelor Degree with a 2nd Training Cycle. Therewere implemented two new courses in different specialties: in 2001/2002, Piano for Chamber Music and Accompaniment, and in 2002/2003, Vocal performance, the latter meanwhile extinct. In 2008/2009, all study plans were then adjusted to the organization resulting from the Bologna Process, accommodating them in a single study cycle composed with six academic semesters.

More recently, in 2020/2021, the Curricular Structures of the four existing specialties began to converge in a single course Bachelor Degree in Music: two options for Instrument Performance for Orchestra (Wind / Percussion Branch and String Branch), another for Orchestra Conducting, and a last one – Piano for Chamber Music and Accompaniment.

In all these aspects, the practical dimension of teaching prevails, always guided by a teaching staff consisting mostly of professional musicians who are, or have been, in the past, members of Metropolitan Orchestra of Lisbon. This eminently technical and artistic vocation, whose visibility is especially expressed in the seasons of OAM and in the chamber concerts of the Young Soloists of Metropolitana, is complemented by curricular units in the scientific areas of Music Education and Musical Sciences, which offer fundamental knowledge for the integral and harmonious development of a musician able to face the demands and competitiveness of a labour market that knows no borders, that one of classical orchestras and, in an even broader context, that one of ensemble instrumental music.

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“I have had the privilege of a career that allows me to travel a lot around the world. In these years of music and travel, I have experienced different cultural and academic realities; my first address outside Portugal was in the north of Chicago, in Evanston, as a master’s student at an American university. Since that moment I learned a lot, but I also realized – and critically observing the cultural and academic reality that I got to know – that the training I received in Portugal and, in particular, at the National Superior Orchestra Academy, was unique and at the level of the best schools all around the world.”

Joana Carneiro, conductor