 Part of me always feels bad when I’m judging a competition. I’m basically conflicted at the notion of combining music and competition. I think it was Berlioz – but it probably wasn’t – who said that competitions were for horses, not musicians. And yet we are universally drawn to them. They are our ever popular ‘refiner’s fire’; we’re always making qualitative determinations, looking to separate out the best of whatever it is that interests us. But I’m not sure that applying to music the same ethic we attach to sports really helps the music, or maybe more accurately helps to nurture the love of it. Every competition has more losers than winners. And making music isn’t about that.
Every group that I’ve ever judged had some redeeming qualities, some intrinsic strengths. While those groups may not have won in competition, it doesn’t mean that they were bad, or that their efforts weren’t worthy of notice or mention. Music is about expression and connection, both of which are miserably difficult to quantify. When music touches my heart, how do I assign it an arbitrary percentage of emotional weight? If a soloist, or an entire group moves me to tears – and it has happened any number of times - what sort of system do I use to evaluate? Foot-pounds of heart tugs? Ergs of happiness? Velocity of tears falling down my face as I hastily blot? What?
Competition takes musical groups and puts them in an unnatural environment. Musical ensembles are not sports teams, even though they occasionally play to the same size crowds, generate lots of biased enthusiasm and spawn fans of equal conviction to those in sports. The whole object of a sporting event is to win. There is no other object. The loser in a sports match up goes home to ignominious defeat. In a successful musical performance, everyone wins, everyone is elevated, and everyone goes home happy. When judging a musical competition, one is forced to use more-or-less tangible guidelines for evaluating and rating the contestants, rather than the internal emotional barometer which, like a compass searching for magnetic north, finds its heading with a quiet thrill, a ‘yes’ that reverberates with one’s internal truth when a certain quotient of musical rectitude is reached. Now that does not mean that one (in the role of judge) ignores the internal compass. When a group finds that ‘sweet spot’, when they unlock their potential to reach into the hearts of their audience, there is an undeniable resonance in the observer/listener/judge, and hopefully the judge can then find some tangible criteria to point at in order to justify the emotional reaction. Ironically, this alchemical connection doesn’t happen when a group is trying to be the best of the lot. It happens when a group cares more about the music than the competition, and the mere fact of the competition is usually enough to direct a group’s focus away from the music, the primary objective.
I’m always amazed at the overall quality of the groups, and how the number of excellent ensembles has grown over time. I have heard high school groups that occasionally outstrip their older counterparts. College a cappella groups are routinely more accomplished than they were a decade ago. Maybe competition has been a spur to the rapid growth of enthusiasm for the genre, and in that manner it has aided the expansion of an art form.
Every ‘reality’ show (you know, those heinous, scripted felonies to which America has become pathetically addicted) is about competition, even in areas that we used to regard as neutral. Dancing, singing, cooking, parenting, dating, fishing, plumbing, – hell, pick a subject, any subject – and you’re likely to find some overblown raggedyass TV show about people competing to be the best at whatever it is. Nearly every one of those shows is about winning and losing - especially about losing. The losings are drawn out, tension filled humiliations that the viewers are humping their tv sets over, they’re so glad that they’re not the ones being crucified and eliminated on national television. More people vote for American Idol than ever voted in a national election. I worry from time to time (that is, whenever I remember to) about whether this competition mentality is having a negative influence on things that were meant to be enjoyed for the sake of their beauty, their life-enhancing qualities; things that we humans have nurtured and developed for centuries simply because they bring us joy and enhance our daily lives. Like music, for instance. Or flowers, or puppies. Oh yeah. There are competitions for them too.
Maybe what it comes down to is where we find the worth in things. If the only worth attached to an ability is whether or not it is the best, (subjectively? Objectively? What is the arbitrary scale being applied here? And for whom could it possibly be valid?) then the great majority of what is being judged is automatically worthless. In my darkest maunderings, this seems like the equivalent of slow cultural suicide. When we judge something as being the ‘best’, all else is then defined in turn as ‘less than’, and somehow unworthy of attention or consideration. In situations in which the best or most desirable is easily definable in objective terms that can be demonstrably or mechanistically quantified, like fastest or slowest, most economical, lightest or heaviest, strongest or weakest, etc., then judging has a purpose. I try to read specs and reviews before purchasing a piece of gear. But when it comes to music there are few objective criteria. Pitch and rhythm are the only nonnegotiables. Everything else is up for grabs and the all-important, less tangible aspects, like connection, sincerity, interpretation, spirit, and communication are relegated to a secondary position.
I think that what I’m trying to do here is to reach out to the groups that don’t end up in the top three, and to let them know that it’s important for them to keep making music, to keep striving for the sake of the music itself. Music is a vibrational medium that deeply affects its listeners long after the sound has faded. It has a pacifying, civilizing, elevating effect on people that is damn near impossible to rate. It is, in a sense, a distillate of all that is good in us, and the more of us that do it, the better off we’ll all be. Music takes the metaphor of ‘being in harmony’ and makes it a reality. And when that happens, everyone wins.
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