Importance of competitions

musicprnt
Fri, 05 Dec 2014 20:45:43 +0000

@‌ bluemeringue-
That happened with the recent Indianapolis violin competition, which is one of the biggiest…in the final round, a large percentage of those who made it were students of Miriam Fried of NEC, who was on the panel…and Aaron Rosand of the Curtis Institute wrote a scathing post about that (he had students who were eliminated from the competition, not surprisingly)…There are also arguments that teachers should not sit on juries of these things, that it should be performers, Manahem Pressler wrote an article about that and what he said was what teachers often look for has little relationship to being a performer and musician and this active performers were better suited for judging how well someone performs (and having seen the winners of some of the big competitions, who had the technical chops but were as boring and unimaginative as a CPA, I kind of agree with the idea)…a lot of teachers are anti competition because they feel the nature of them does little to drive forward musicality and musicianship, that it turns it into a game or something to be gamed (ie instead of kids learning to express the music, feel it and understand it, you have teachers who teach the kid how to play the music to win a competition).

That doesn’t mean that competitions are bad, I don’t believe that, it means that they are valuable as performing opportunities and to perform under pressure and to be judged, as you will be on an audition, but to use the results of a competition, whether good or bad, as a measure of how good you are is quite frankly of minimal value.To be honest, the real value is in listening to the other kids play and seeing where their strong and weak points are as a listener, rather than how the judges end up ranking them, unless a kid is completely dismal, music students are both self critical and tend to see how other kids are playing because they are so good at self analyzing. I will add that many winners of the most pretigious competitions end up disappearing (to become teachers, often, promoting how they won x, y and z), and that a lot of the musicians who end up making it as soloists or solid working musicians have done little with them… in the violin world, it is kind of sad, when we watch the various top level competitions, you see pretty much a core group of what I call professional competitors, who to me seem to keep trying the competitions, hoping to win and to catch lightening in a bottle and become a soloist, when maybe they might be able to spend their time better honing their skills, networking, and finding the path to a solid career.