It's unlikely you would think of the National Folk Festival.

However, the two Canberra institutions have officially come together in a way that will benefit them both - and, importantly, benefit emerging musicians.

The ANU School of Music and the National Folk Festival announced on Tuesday the signing of a three-year partnership agreement encompassing the 2024, 2025 and 2026 festivals.

The interim managing director of the National Folk Festival, Chris Grange, said he had a meeting with the School of Music a couple of years ago.

What came up was a question: "What would you really like from a partnership?"

Now we know.

It began in 2022, when the School of Music had Tobias Cole lead the festival choir in a performance of My Island Home in the Ngunnawal language that was recorded in the ANU's Yil Lull Recording Studio.

But with this new agreement, there's much more to come.

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The head of the ANU School of Music, Professor Kim Cunio, said, "I'm a bit of a folkie myself" and that he was a multi-instrumentalist who had performed at the festival in the past.

Professor Cunio said the coming together of the festival and the School of Music felt inevitable - two Canberra musical institutions joining forces.

The partnership - which is more in kind than financial - is aimed at increasing opportunities for emerging musicians and broadening musical education.

Some festival performers - Australian and international - will offer masterclasses and workshops to students from Canberra and elsewhere, introducing them to or deepening their knowledge of folk music.

The School of Music will curate and produce a Youth Stage venue for musicians aged from 12 to 25 within the festival and will offer exceptional youth musicians recording time in its studio.

It will also provide opportunities for First Nations musicians to collaborate and record with ANU School of Music staff.

The National Folk Festival and the National Library of Australia's joint Folk Fellowship program will be supplemented. Recipients will receive a visiting academic appointment to the ANU School of Music and a two-day recording studio opportunity.

Professor Cunio said School of Music students "are still learning about folk" and the partnership would enable them to find out more. One possibility was to put them into collaborations with festival musicians where performances were often planned and executed with more spontaneity than in the formal academic and concert settings.

Looking beyond the next few years, Professor Cunio hoped there would be further developments in the collaboration - perhaps, for example, a conference that would, among other subjects, discuss the preservation of folk music. "We'll see what happens," he said.

The 2023 National Folk Festival will be on from April 6 to 10. See: folkfestival.org.au.

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