Comments

15 girls, 1 guy.... poor guy! Igor, that's just the way talent is distributed. ;-)

Thanks, Laurie. That was a lot more helpful than anything I could find on the violin.org website.

Poor Bella...9 AM!!!! ugh! I am very surprised David Coucheron did not advance. I thought he played very well. Did someone see something I missed? I felt certain he would make semis. OK woman are the stronger race on violin, but I liked Dalibor Karvay very much in the semi's and first round of the Elisabethcompetition in Brussel, so a pity he did not reach the semi's here.
Fine for Simone Lamsma that she reaches the semi's.(I played Chachaturian with her) To be more precise: There are more young girls than boys who play violin. Than there are more girls than boys at conservatories. Because there are more girls at the bottom, there will also be more girls at the top. There are no big fysical differences between man and woman in playing the violin.
Playing violin for boys is becoming like playing harp for boys or become a ballet-dancer. It is not sturdy or macho for boys and too much woman-like and has an imago-problem. Also a bigger percentage of ballet-dancers and male harp-players is gay, compared with the average, but that should not be a reason for boys not to play harp, violin or become a ballet-dancer. I would like to see more guys there, really. I have to agree with Bram; it's a matter of attracting an equal amount of both genders to the field of violin playing. It's funny - for some reason I never considered violin a gender-instrument. Flute - sure... Harp - of course, even piano to a certain degree... I always saw the violin as a uni-sex instrument, if you will... Strange. That reminds me of the Montréal International Musical Competition very much. They decided to announce the finalists by alphabetical order of last name, so out onto the stage walked:

Corinne Chapelle
Jinjoo Cho
Ye-Eun Choi
Gu Wen-Lei
Mayuko Kamio
Ji-Yoon Park
and Elizaveta Schnayder.

"Finally, a guy," remarked jury president André Bourbeau in French, to the audience's laughter, before announcing the name of Marcus Tanneberger.

Clearly, girls are just wrapping up their takeover of the entire violin world. :-)

Hm, that's funny. I have slightly more male violin students than female.