Beyond Judgment

There's something odd about competitive art.  You don't see competitive watercolor painting or competitive clay scupture weekends (as far as I know!) but often you see competitive singing - there are lots of festivals where choirs, choruses and ensembles are judged, and a winner is chosen.

In barbershop, for example, one of the central activities is the contest.  Many quartets and choruses go to incredible lengths, expending a huge percentage of their time and energy to put two songs onto the contest stage several times a year.  The barbershop organization does its part by supplying judging category descriptions, highly trained and selected judges, medals, plaques and trophies for the winners, etc.  It's a lot of work!

I can understand how one might assign a score to a performance based on its technical elements.  A judge can estimate how often a group is in tune, or how well the arrangement follows the barbershop rules.  Sweet Adeline judges in the Showmanship category probably find it pretty easy to determine if everyone was wearing a matching outfit.  Judges can even take a blind stab at the level of artistry and impact in a performance, although I feel they're getting on thin ice with that kind of thing.

But what strikes me is that all the truly human aspects of a performance, the authentic, personal truths underneath the music that infuse it with meaning, are completely beyond judgment.  How can we say that one person's joy warrants an 80 where another person's joy is only a 65?  What's the best way to measure real anguish?  How can we assign a meaningful number to excitement, or pain, or love?  It just doesn't make any sense.  We can't.

So when groups refuse to play the technical game, strange and wonderful things happen.  Emotional things happen.  In circumstances like that, judges tend to forget themselves just like any other audience member - they get carried away, and only remember after the fact, when the applause has died down, that they were supposed to reduce the performance to a number between 1 and 100.

And that, i believe, should be the goal.  Put enough real life up on stage that everyong forgets to monitor the technique for a while.  It will do them good.