Pros and Cons of competitions

Thank you to Helen at Camac Harps for the plug for my blog on the Camac Harpblog! I feel so honored to be featured in such a serious and wonderful publication, and additionally encouraged that she completed the post with the poignant citation of a convocation address given to incoming students at Juilliard in 1964. The speech addresses the big question which musicians are constantly posing to themselves: why do we devote our lives to music when it is a life of such adversity; is it worth it? I quote here the part I found most inspiring, from the closing paragraph:

“If you want to understand art, you have to understand the world; in order to understand the world, you have to understand human beings; then you will understand yourselves, and that is the key to everything. That will make playing, composing, dancing less an exhibition of unimportant skills in a society game, meeting with more or less approval, blindly climbing up the deceitful ladder of success, but an opening of your heart to the world and the world to your heart. And that is what you came here for, this is what makes music one of the most sublime emanations of the human spirit, that is what makes it worthwhile to devote one's life to it.”

It is precisely this “exhibition of unimportant skills” and “deceitful ladder of success” that competitions tend to get everybody focused on – competitions, diplomas, and all forms of prestige, for that matter. In the mess of second-guessing yourself, trying to figure out what the judges are looking for, worrying whether you're good enough, beating your head into the wall practicing the same pieces again and again, it's too easy to lose track of why we do music. We come to believe that winning first place, or having certain diplomas from certain institutions, really matters in the long-term. This view doesn't make any sense to me; the only thing that could possibly matter in music is whether people enjoy listening to you or not.

The two are closely related, but the causal relation between them is confused. It's what you learn at the conservatory that is valuable, not the diploma. Maybe diplomas are useful in other careers, but music diplomas won't do much in the way of getting you a recording contract, concerts, an agent, or any of the other staples of a music career. It's not prizes in competitions that will lead you to success in the end, but the ability to play really well and to capture the hearts of your audience. If you are very good at that, you may also win some prizes in competitions, but not the other way around.

Results were recently announced for the ARD competition that took place in Munich this month. This is another important, international, four-stage competition for harp (they also hold equivalent competitions for other instruments). I learned this year that they not only assign first, second, and third prizes, but they also award an “audience prize.” I assume this is where the audience gets to vote on who they liked the best. The crazy thing is that the audience prize doesn't necessarily go to the first-prize winner! In the harp competition, Anneleen, who was awarded third prize by the jury, won the audience prize, and in the violin competition, the second-prize winner received the audience prize. This clearly betrays the subjectivity involved and the conflict of interests between the audience and the jury. Let's be clear, once you're out trying to sell CDs and convincing people to come to your concerts, it's that audience prize that you're going for.

Competitions are useful because playing music well (especially the harp) is damn hard – very technically demanding – and the technical side of music can be judged quite objectively, by experienced musicians who know what details to look for. By rewarding those who achieve great technical mastery (both in execution and in interpretation), the standard is constantly being raised, and we become witness to levels of attention-to-detail never seen before in history. The competitive atmosphere provides great motivation to pay attention to those details – motivation that I, personally, never would be able to muster otherwise. Working on individual details is tedious and not especially musical, but once they are all finessed and intelligently put together, it turns out to be precisely those little details that work the magic in a musical performance.

What's been upsetting me recently, however, are the ways in which the game-world of the competition is a distortion of the real world. In isolating the technical aspects, the game has eliminated many of the more creative aspects of being an artist. A prime example of this is that the repertoire is all imposed. I suddenly woke up this year and realized that the pieces I play have always been dictated by the competitions that I do. It will be such a revolution to finally choose my own repertoire once this is all over! Another is that there is such a ridiculous amount of repertoire to prepare all at once for this competition that in the months before, it is practically impossible to be a well-rounded human being because you can't afford to spend your concentration on anything else. I have always thought that the single-minded pursuit of one great goal is a wonderfully romantic notion, but in practice it is beginning to wear on me. There is so much more to being a musician than this, and so much more to life. In Life-After-Israel I'll have the chance to discover who I want to be as an artist, in all the other ways that competitions don't address, and I'm greatly looking forward to it!