Importance of competitions

musicprnt
Fri, 05 Dec 2014 02:36:25 +0000

I, too, am skeptical about ‘my kid won every competition they entered’ , if every kid whose parent said that, or the famous “my kid was auditioning, and the members of the audition panel said he played like Heifetz” really was like that, all the top soloists would be out of a job lol. Seriously, I would be careful about using competitions to measure how good you are, there are a lot of competitions out there, and quite frankly many of them are local little events, often with local teachers judging it and such and draw ‘local talent’, so those can be hard to tell how good you are from them. Judges in competitions can be parochial, there are a ton of things that can happen. My son had a judge in a competition rip his solo bach, yet that same piece helped get him admitted to some of the top conservatories, the teacher he now studies with said that the panels on two of the schools he was on said it really impressed them, so who do you believe, teachers at two of the top conservatories out there, or some member of ASTA or whatever shrug.

And on the obverse, someone my son know won one of the most prestigious string competitions in the world, and yet a month before winning that competition didn’t get into Curtis, go figure.