Studied piano and music theory in the Netherlands. He has taught music theory at the Amsterdam Conservatory, the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, and the Escola Superior de Mùsica de Catalunya (ESMUC) in Barcelona before he was appointed full-professor at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of of the National University of Singapore in 2023. His specialties are improvisation and collaborative music creation. He is active as a performer, improvisation, educator, and researcher. He gave master classes in improvisation at conservatories around the world and is a strong believer in the importance of improvisation skills for any present-day musician. Karst de Jong was one of the initiators of the European METRIC project, a collaboration between 14 major European higher music education institutions to introduce improvisation into the curricula of Higher Music Education in Europe. He has released two CDs with piano-solo improvisations, ‘Improdisiac’ I and II.
Karst de Jong (1961)
Teaching (present and past)
NUS/Yong Siew Toh Conservatory – Singapore
Karst de Jong is currently a full-time professor at the YST Conservatory of the National University of Singapore (NUS). His primary mission is to bring improvisation back into the curricula of contemporary music students. In these times the musical landscape is changing rapidly. Asian countries start to realize that it is not a given to just copy Western music education which has been largely unchanged since the late 18th century. Creative agency is the key distinguishing quality any present-day musician should have, and conservatories need to develop their curricula to enable their students to develop these qualities.
Royal Conservatory The Hague – The Netherlands
For more than 30 years Karst de Jong has been a professor of music theory, aural skills and improvisation at the Royal Conservatoire of Den Haag. He was co-initiator of the METRIC program within the European Erasmus+ programme, creating a network of institutions of Higher Music education with the goal to develop and stimulate improvisation in the curricula of present-day music students.
ESMUC Barcelona – Spain
Karst de Jong was a professor of improvisation and composition techniques from 2002 to 2022 at the Escola Superior de Musica de Catalunya in Barcelona. He contributed to make improvisation a natural part of the practice of any performing musican, and taught a new generation of composers to embrace the techniques of the great masters of the past as a foundation for their future practice.
