all marks good except one really bad: what to do?

TheOpusOne
Mon, 28 Jun 2010 10:28:12 +0000

Thanks everyone for all the very informing replies!

I actually live down the street from Glenn Gould School (which is across the street from U of T’s faculty of music). Definitely, for the Canadian side of things, GGS is great! I’ve heard some things about McGill though that made me not so sure about it; maybe some of you here have more insight on this:

I’ve seen rankings for McGill consistently ranking in the top five for music schools, and of course, the general academics there is Canada’s best as well. However, I have been told that the teachers - at least the piano professors - there are so busy performing and lecturing all around the world that freshmen are usually only given to TAs for basically half the year, and that the actual time students get to see their teachers (though highly accomplished pedagogues) is about 3 months out of the whole year. Apparently this is the downside to such a large school. I’ve heard this from a student in my former theory class who’s now studying at UofT instead of McGill though she got into both. Of course it may have been just her personal bias… @violindad, how has your son found McGill music in this respect?

Also, violindad was also mentioning how we shouldn’t assume that “grass is greener at the other side” of the boarder. This is absolutely right, but I’ve been rather confused as to how the Canadian schools compare with those in the states. You were talking about how UofT, McGill, UBC were more in form like Northwestern etc and how GGS is more in form like Julliard and Curtis, but is there anywhere I can read about how they compare in terms of how good they are? I know this is really a subjective thing, but are there at least tiers that we can categorize the various school with? That would be most helpful seeing as I already know so much about the Canadian side of things (except McGill, as I haven’t been to Montreal in years) and regularly run into/get adjudicated/do masterclasses with the teachers at UofT/GGS but I have no idea how that translates into US schools. For example, what - in terms of level of “how good it is” - is the US equivalent of GGS or UT?

Finally, relating on the previous point about how I’m already quite familiar with the Canadian scene but don’t know how that translates with the scene in the US: in Canada, the famous pedagogues are like Andre Laplante, Marc Durand, James Anagnoson, etc (FEEL FREE TO ADD TO THIS LIST). Who are the teachers to look for in the States?