Irene Savaree
President and CEO
With people now seeing music as a prospective career that offers a plethora of growth opportunities, higher education institutes have started offering programs to develop musicians that can carve out a path for themselves. Leading the music education strata in South East Asia is the International College of Music (ICOM). In the 1980s, a handful of accomplished musicians went to the acclaimed Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA (USA) and returned home to pioneer the development of the professional music industry in Malaysia. However, there was a void for a similar school of contemporary music locally to feed the music industry with educated musicians trained in the areas of songwriting, arranging, music production and engineering and film scoring. The International College of Music (ICOM) was established in Malaysia in 1996 with the mission to discover and develop musicians that can achieve fruitful careers in the professional music industry.
Offering Class-Leading Music Education
ICOM's vision is to be the music education hub in Asia, offering innovative programs that lead to music enterprise. The institute is the only private college of contemporary music in Malaysia to offer a professional music education at diploma and degree level. Owing to the fact that ICOM was established by musicians for musicians, the entire structure and curriculum of the institute is different from other music courses offered by traditional institutions. "We strive to offer contemporary music education and our commitment is backed by our investment of over RM 40 million in the college's facilities which include a recording studio, a surround sound production suite, acoustically treated practice rooms and ensemble rooms, classrooms, a music library and a performance hall that seats 150 people. Currently, we have tertiary level full-time programs, after school music programs for secondary school musicians, school holiday music programs for young musicians from 8 to 18 years old, corporate training programs and teacher training programs. Our programs