Chapter 4 considers routes that advanced string players took to prepare for entering the workplace, and the changing socioeconomic and gender constraints that shaped their options. It begins by unearthing informal modes of training and “ways in,” including private or family instruction and unpaid work experience in theater orchestras, and it ends with an examination of what British conservatoire education could offer those who could afford to attend such institutions. Both sections draw on testimonies of individuals. A middle section provides a close examination of diplomas that engages scholarly conversations about musicians’ quest for professionalization and the credibility of qualifications. College of Violinists’ diplomas emerge as reputable qualifications and the exams of choice for less affluent players who wanted to teach. The chapter argues that by increasing the supply of certified teachers and competent performers for both the professional and amateur scenes, conservatoire instruction and reputable diploma certification ensured the robust continuation of violin culture in Britain beyond 1930.

Commercially run grade examinations and competitive music festivals, which tested learners’ attainment, were central to the consolidation of violin culture across Britain. Chapter 3 analyzes the string exams operated by three institutions, each of which targeted different socioeconomic groups. Bringing the College of Violinists – the first exam board to offer elementary string exams and the only one to guarantee string players would be assessed by specialists– into dialog with the more often discussed ABRSM and Society of Arts, the discussion evaluates exam requirements, candidate numbers, and success rates. At root, exams were tools for motivating students and supporting and shaping learning. Regional competition festivals offered additional opportunities for more advanced pupils’ performance to be assessed (in a public hall, as opposed to a private exam room) and, along with the exam boards, they contributed to the informal standardization of core repertoire. The chapter also surveys instructional materials, some of which were responses to the exam culture, and weighs students’ experiences of learning.

Not all eighteenth-century mock-arts were satires. The long, mixed blank-verse poems modelled on Virgil’s Georgics that were popular throughout the period always dealt positively with the practical, mechanical world. Georgic poems followed oblique strategies, coded into the genre by their ancient models: their paradoxically rational appeal to slow, unconscious experience and their characteristic swerves into digressive anecdote, haptic description and mythography. Georgic (like satire) is interested in the processes by which people sharpen their wits, not through the exercise of raillery, but through the ‘labor improbus’ of skilled work. Like the Scriblerian mock artists, Georgic writers applied representations of the mechanical arts to political contexts. Comparison between satirical mock arts and georgic poems is fruitful because of what they have in common: a rhetoric of indirection, a psychology focused on extended cognition and tacit knowledge and a fascination with the mechanics of commercial production.

In the era of the colleges’ foundation around 1880, ‘applied science’ dominated the space between science and practice in British education. However, ‘technology’ was an increasingly popular competitor. These two categories of knowledge were associated with different institutions and classes of students, and between the 1870s and World War Two, educators treated the two as complementary. So, this chapter asks how ‘technology’ was used in this period and how it related to ‘applied science’. ‘Technology’ was popularised by the technical education examined first by the Society of Arts and then by the City and Guilds. While carefully differentiated from workplace apprenticeship, it was much more practical than applied science. Government concern not to interfere with the free market and industrial anxieties about proprietary knowledge defended the divide. In the early twentieth century, emulating American and German models, ‘higher technological education’ taught at its own elite centres, particularly at Imperial College, in Manchester, and in Glasgow, came to be differentiated from technical education.