A History of the Royal (Toronto) Conservatory of Music Piano Examinations, 1887-2015: Their Impact and Influence

Since its inception in 1887, the Royal Conservatory of Music has maintained its position as one of the largest and oldest community-based music schools and education centres in North America, with an integrated examination body and a comprehensive graded curriculum, influencing and shaping the Canadian musical landscape. For the past 130 years, the Conservatory has presented a wide-ranging art music repertoire for studying piano and offered a comprehensive system for assessing students progress through its Examinations, recently retitled as The Certificate Program.
The Conservatorys internal examinations began in 1887, with the external examinations following in 1898. The latter preserved the format of the former and expanded through increasing the number of the examination centres across Canada for both financial and educational reasons. Despite varying opinions of professionals and amateurs on the efficacy and value of the piano examinations in particular from the beginning, this dissertation, using historical sources and interviews, argues that over the years the structure and content of the piano examinations, while innately conservative on the whole, have kept up with a changing demographic of students across the country, and either countered or taken on the many criticisms that surrounded them over the years despite geographical and financial challenges, and indeed competition from other institutions. Recently they have been hardy enough to enter the American market. Overall, the Conservatorys examination system has created a cultural asset ideal for a country such as Canada, providing, promoting, and disseminating both the branded curriculum and controlled assessment, which contributed to the development and improvement of music education rapidly and effectively.
A distinctive part of the dissertation in addition to its detailed history is the interviews with current examiners and teachers, who face a whole new set of challenges and uncharted waters as technology offers new approaches to teaching and evaluation. In this ethnographic approach, their voices add a whole new dimension to the historical survey of the examinations system, arguing that despiteor perhaps because ofthe weight of tradition they still have much to offer.