Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this dissertation I examine arguments for teaching post-secondary violin students to be versatile musicians rather than specialists in one genre or area of music. In order to do this, I assess the professional and educational opportunities in Toronto based on interviews with nine professional violinists as well as teachers and administrators at four institutions that offer post-secondary instruction in violin performance. To supplement information gathered through interviews, violinists and violists performing with the National Ballet of Canada and the Esprit Orchestra were asked to respond to a questionnaire regarding their training and work experiences. Data collected through fieldwork is contextualized by an analysis of scholarly writing, periodicals and websites on the topic of current post-secondary music curriculum and pedagogy methods.\nThroughout the dissertation, I build the case that, despite strong opinions and many years of pedagogy that emphasize the contrary, versatility provides many advantages to professional violinists when compared to specialization. In order to maximize the benefits of versatility in a professional career, I draw on Benjamin Brinner’s notion of core competences (Brinner 1995) to posit the skills necessary for professional musicians to pursue successful, enduring careers in Toronto. Applying these core competences to an analysis of violinists’ training, I explore the violin curriculum of post-secondary music schools in Toronto: The University of Toronto, the Glenn Gould School, Humber College, and York University to examine how students are being trained. In particular, I query how students are being prepared to be profession violinists with a focus on whetherthey are being prepared to be versatile musicians or specialists in one style. I conclude by offering recommendations as to how to better teach versatility based on the findings of the previous chapters. I explain that versatility can be nurtured in the school environment through teacher training and curricular changes that emphasize informal learning approaches, shifts in conventionally held assumptions about musical value and career success, and by encouraging exploration and improvisation as a basis of developing creativity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".