International congresses
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Save the date • Congress 2025
The 40th Congress will be held from 14 to 19 July 2025 in the Lyon region of France!
Highlight: the launch of the Willems International Orchestra 🎵🎺
Are you a musician, music lover or teacher who can devote a week to discovering Edgar Willems’ teaching methods or learning more about them? Then the Willems Conferences are for you!
A Willems® Congress is a time for meeting and exchanging ideas.
Gathered together in the early morning for the public lessons and in the evening for the concerts and the FIW General Assembly, the delegates will also have many opportunities to share during the workshops, breaks and meals which can be taken together near the venue.
Traditionally, at Willems® Congresses, time is also devoted to choral singing, an active form of musical sharing that brings the congress participants together in the middle or at the end of the day.
Why take part?
1 – Discover Edgar Willems’ educational proposal
Perhaps you have a more or less precise idea of what the ‘Willems Method®’ is?
Is it a Method, in fact? Yes, but not only that: it’s also an artistic movement!
A Willems® conference will enlighten you on the vast panorama covered by the term ‘Method’. Because while it takes method to plan and design a coherent music education programme from the initiation of very young children right up to professional level, it is not enough to inspire the artistic and human dimension needed to make music.
Educational progression
While the artistic and human dimension is omnipresent in the musical practice that she leads, one of the characteristics of Edgar Willems’ proposal is the pedagogical progression in 4 psychological degrees, which mark out the technical stages necessary for the acquisition of the bases of the musical language going from the oral to the written to come back to the oral while passing by the inner hearing.
Public lessons with children
Every day, practising music with children allows us to see and feel the stages of progression that lead these children to be ‘musicalised’. This is undoubtedly the best way of understanding the density of the work involved in training both complete musicians and creative human beings who listen to others. Because musical education has the virtue of balancing and harmonising the 3 dimensions of the human being – physical, emotional and mental – to facilitate social life.
2 – Broadening its own teaching practices
Educators who have been in the profession for more or less time generally ask themselves questions about their practice. Are we still in tune with today’s young people? Where do we draw the line between fashionable practices, speeches (sometimes more or less demagogic) and the basics needed for a real musical education? What are the answers to some of the problems encountered over the years?
Fortunately, Edgar Willems doesn’t have all the answers! However, he does offer a number of keys to analysis, based on observation, that will enable everyone to diagnose the causes of difficulties, opening up possible ways of remedying them.
Practical teaching workshops :
In the workshops offered at the Congresses, all the major stages in the progression will be taken up and developed with the participants:
3 – Deepening our practices
It’s beneficial for our usual practices to be revisited, questioned, deepened and completed; our ‘discoveries’ from experience benefit from being shared, submitted to our peers, invigorated or readjusted.
The workshops listed above are sometimes presented in duplicate, by two different speakers. This is an opportunity to understand, compare and contrast practices, and gain perspective on the issues addressed. The same subject is presented very differently by one or other of the artists and teachers present, which shows that Edgar Willems’ teaching approach is not dogmatic.
4 – Musical life
The Congress is a celebration of musical education. So it’s only natural that it should be peppered with concerts and performances at various times of the day!
5 – Exchanges with colleagues
Throughout the week, you’ll be able to talk to people interested in the same subjects, driven by the same curiosity, coming from France, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Slovenia and many other countries… and sometimes from much further afield!
