There’s that old joke about a tourist in New York who asks a passerby how to get to Carnegie Hall, one of the world’s most prestigious classical music venues.

“Practise, practise, practise,” the local quips.

But if they were really in the know, rather than just a wiseguy, they’d have added that an artist diploma from the city’s Juilliard School – the pre-eminent performing arts school, whose alumni have won more than 100 Grammys, 62 Tonys and 16 Pulitzers – couldn’t hurt.

And now two Australian brothers are about to make history in that course: they are the second guitarists, and the first guitar duo, to be accepted into a scholarship program that takes on only a handful of the world’s best young musicians each year, and rigorously trains them to become even better.

“It’s kind of the ultimate educational opportunity,” says Ziggy Johnston, 26, the taller – and older by two years – of the pair. Adds Miles: “we can really focus on finding our unique voice as artists”.

They’re currently back in Melbourne, where they grew up, for a few months before they head back to New York to start the two-year course. They’ve been living there for a few years doing master’s degrees, as soloists, at Juilliard.

After graduating the masters they applied for the artist diploma but only made it to the waitlist, so they spent a year freelancing, “experiencing New York and, because of COVID, having to fight our way through to do anything”, says Ziggy. But they learnt a lot more in that year about what they wanted to do: to showcase Australian music, for example (Paul Grabowsky, himself a Juilliard alumnus, gave them a few tips on their second application).

They asked if they could study as a duo and were told “in theory, yeah”, says Miles. The artist diploma program has had two before: piano and violin duos, but both were exceptions that required bureaucratic workarounds in the long, demanding application process.