Are all the compositions going to be judged by every judge? And are we going to solely judge them by giving a text commentary on the score? I think that all the judges should judge the piece according to five agreed-upon criteria (for example, "instrumentation", "form", "development" (including the treatment of the theme and variations), "notation" and "compliance" (with the rules) ) and have like, 5 points for each criterion (a total of 25). Thus, we would grade the pieces according to those 5 criteria (X out of 5 points) and also give a general comment on each piece, so the composition with the most cummulative points will win (and also we could declare a winner on each distinct category - best "instrumentation" composition, best "form" composition etc, if we wanted to, of course). Moreover, this would be good because it will make judges elaborate on their markings, so that if a judge gives 1/5 in the "instrumentation" criterion of a piece and another gives 5/5, they will both have to explain why they gave that grade and not just by saying "1/5 because the instrumentation sucks" (it's obvious that that's what the judge thinks if he gave the piece a 1/5 on instrumentation..), but like "1/5 because the instruments' choice is not justified by the range in which each instrument plays, and dynamics have not been assigned to instruments which are relatively more suitable in this kind of dynamic range (e.g. the composer wrote a ppp on the low register of the tubas and fff on the high register of the piano)" etc etc etc, so conflicts in the grades would be more or less avoided.
Also, anonymity brings up another problem: we don't know the musical background of the composer. One composer could be a composition graduate while another could be a recent member of YC and an amateur composer, and whose this is the first composition competition he enters.. Could the composers write just one paragraph explaining their musical background and what they want to accomplish through composing? This would give us an idea as of what kind of criticism we should give (thus making the criticism much more constructive and more personalised, instead of unified, but still anonymous).
It's like trying to judge the actions taken by 5 poker players in a game: you have to know each players' background as well as their goals (maybe someone is a good player but wanted to lose because he is playing with his mother-in-law's money
). Just an idea (I've never been a judge before -at least formally- so I don't know how it's supposed to be done in YC).
Oh, and how long do we have before we give in the marking of each piece? As in, since the competition ends on January 31st, that means that by the time we will have started judging the pieces, there will already be a February Monthly Competition going on. So we certainly won't have one month to judge the pieces, and I seriously do hope no-one is expecting us to go through all the pieces between the 31st of January and the 1st of February
So, what do you guys (judges, mostly, but other people as well) think?
Jan 12 2008, 7:57 PM
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Concerning anonymity, I don't think there's much point because if someone wanted a judge to know that a piece is theirs, all they have to do is just send them a note saying "the piece with the three flutes and the oboe in e major is mine", and so far for the anonymity, because the judge will be biased, for the better or worse, towards that member. Plus, with the marking criteria, it will be hard(er) to be biased towards someone.
Linear Mode
