> The Lowland and Border Pipers Society have an interesting method of > judging their annual competitions. Each performer is marked out of 100. > 50 marks are awarded by a judge looking at technique, tuning and so on. > The other 50 are given by 5 members of the audience selected at random > (marks out of 10 each) based entirely on the musical experience/ > entertainment value /whatever you want to call it. Most of the audience > are known to each other and the performers, and it makes for a really > good atmosphere.
Basically "Pop Idol" with beards, isn't it? I've been at a few of these, and it always puts you in a funny position with scoring. When you hear the first performer, you've no idea how much better or worse the later ones are going to be, so the first always get 5/10 and the later ones higher or lower than that to get the ordering you want. If a judge is scoring by objective factors like accuracy of tuning or missed gracenotes, it's a lot easier to judge each performer in isolation. Which may be why competitions tend to drift into judging by easily measurable trivia. (BTW, I now have a short piece "The Piper of Peebles", which I wrote for the L&BPS newsletter, on my website). Usually it isn't the competitors who get really obsessed the way Toby described it, it's their mothers. Competition judges can come away feeling like they've just got between a brown bear and her young. =================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> =================== Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
