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Judge for yourself…
By Howard Snell
Is there life after contesting? You bet! But I still logged asap
onto 4BarsRest early on the National Saturday evening to find the
result and was delighted to see that Fairey with Alan Withington
had won. Or should it be the other way round? The Band’s whirlwind
musical chairs have now stopped and come to rest with top quality
all round the stand. And Alan, pound for pound spent on players,
over the last few years is clearly the leading contesting conductor
anywhere. (Should there be a handicapping system based on each Band’s
wages bill for players?) While Fairey can certainly go on a great
run in the immediate future, without a doubt the current Band of
the Moment is Cory: they are crowding the top at every contest.
Bob Childs, who served a long and patient conducting apprenticeship
in Yorkshire, is now reaping the benefits of his accumulated skills,
served up with lashings of Welsh hwyl. (That’s the stuff that
the Welsh football team has found that the rugby team lost about
twenty years ago. Sven’s never heard of it.) Anyone who remembers
the heady days of Cory with Arthur Kenney must expect a thorough
testing at every contest in future. All English bands will have
to be at the top of their game to survive the Cory assault.
I recently experienced a very different contesting situation during
a conducting assignment in Austria. As a side dish to my conducting
I was asked to join a wind band judging panel for a local contest.
(Actually it was called a ‘Festival’ as wind bands are
posh and don’t like to call these events anything so vulgar
as Contests!) We, the panel of four sat at the back of a medium
sized hall, in the open, and were required to give marks for ten
categories, including subjects such as intonation, ensemble, balance
and interpretation. We could talk or not as we wished. We were asked
to hold up cards at the end of each band’s performance to
give our marks (out of ten, with 0.5s in between … why not
out of twenty, only God knows … although why brass bands don’t
mark out of thirty, when no-one ever gets below 70 or 170, again
only God knows.) Obviously this reveals at once what each juror
has thought. The marks for each category are then totalled and divided
to give a precise mark down to two decimal points. Yes, there was
also ‘artistic impression, just like in ice skating.
The only guidance received from the organiser at the start was
that the first band was not one of the best and not one of the worst,
which is approximately what happens in the standard brass band ‘blind’
situation. (You know the sort of thing …. however well band
No1 plays ‘there’ll be a few good ones along later’.)
And please mark ‘no lower than 6’ and generally ‘no
higher than 9’. So I started off as requested, marking around
about the 7.5 mark, and tried relate to this level throughout. Two
of my three colleagues started off at 8.5 and stayed up at and above
9 throughout, ignoring the organiser’s recommendations. (Which
reminded me of the occasion I judged at Brass in Concert when the
entertainment judges completely ignored the organisers sensible
guidance as how to mark in relation to the music judges.) The third
colleague was middling, while I was consistently the lowest. The
open situation was excellent and allowed clear and natural audition
of the bands, not the starved, mono sounds heard in brass band boxes.
What did I take from this experience? That judging is not an exact
science ….well, we all knew that, didn’t we? ….
that marks for segments of performance such as intonation, gives
the whole event a pseudo-scientific impression. (Achtung! We haf
vays of maykink you judge!) In effect the whole thing was just as
chaotic and random as the banding equivalent. In fact more chaotic,
when I remember that some bands played a set test piece, but then
again some didn’t. Nobody seemed to care, and no explanation
was forthcoming. This rather spoiled the effect of exactness carefully
created by all those decimal points!
So where do I stand after this new experience? Well, much the same
place as before. I enjoy judging, but prefer to do it by myself,
in the open, and to take the performances as whole pieces, without
carving them up into little dead bits. Then I know where I stand
and the bands know where I stand. No nonsense. Naturally with those
views I don’t expect to be judging much in UK until organisers
hand out paranoia pills to all competing bands and conductors. They’ll
need an articulated lorry to carry that many. (They’d suspect
the pills anyway.)
Oh! The result of that little contest in Austria? Just like the
Nationals where (I hear) the best band won, the best band won.
© Howard Snell 2002 [© 4BarsRest]
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