judges

In a judged performance, first impressions are critical.  And people hate to be wrong, so if they expect you to score 80 before you even walk on stage, you have a big advantage.  I remember scoring the quartets at International every year, and realizing that I could convert from my results to the official results by adjusting for the number of past champs and judges in the quartet.  If they sang no better than a 75 but they have three past champs and two judges, you can guess they’ll be in the finals.  It might not be feasible to make yourself into a past champ or a judge, at least in the short term, but you need to understand this dynamic and use it to your advantage.  Back in the 80's, a famous coach used to send videotapes of the groups he was coaching to all the judges, to get feedback before the deadline (since there’s a period before any contest when a judge is not allowed to work with any groups that will be competing).  I don't know if he was thinking of it in this way, but from my perspective it was a pretty brilliant move, because it made all the judges familiar with the groups!  The results were clear – for more than a decade, that coach was known as the guy who coached all the champs.

Realtime scored higher every time we sang a song on the contest stage, and not necessarily because we were getting better every time - it was partly because it took a while for the judges to “get used to us.”  One judge who was in the pit when we placed 7th in Louisville in 2004 approached us, years after we won, and apologized for giving us a score that was too low, explaining that he just wasn’t expecting us!  I understand why this might happen.  If you're a judge, there’s a lot of personal risk involved in giving out a bad score, i.e. one that differs substantially from your peers.  And this creates a system with a bias towards conservative judgments.  You can imagine that a judge is almost never going to give out a 92 unless he’s pretty darned sure that the other judges are going to give out a similar score.  Imagine the ribbing in the judges' lounge after the contest!  "Wow 92!  Are you taking cash under the table?"

So one strategy to help yourself out is to become a known entity, with positive associations, before the contest even starts.  Would this work?  Absolutely - that's the whole point of the global advertising industry.  It works for Coke, it will work for you for the same reasons.  So create a web site.  Get out and sing for people.  Create a buzz.  It's a fun way to get known, and getting known is a big part of the game.

You can also influence that first mark on the scoresheet by making a great first impression when you do finally step on stage.  As I've mentioned in previous articles, even before you start singing the judges are starting to decide where you will be on that scoresheet.  I recently pre-judged a whole district contest from my seat in the audience, by giving a score to each quartet before they started to sing.  I was pretty close to correct!  So you can tell a lot from that first impression.  Make sure your first impression is spectacular.  Come out on stage acting like someone who deserves the score you want.  Arrogance won’t do it – the key is to exhibit confidence as well as thankfulness and humility to the audience, for their enthusiasm and the energy they are giving you.  That’s what the champs do.

As an important side benefit, acting like a champ will actually make you sing better too!  There’s a famous coaching exercise where you ask a group to sing like a 50, then a 60, then a 70, and on up.  It’s amazing that when you ask a group who previously scored no higher than 68 to sing like an 80, they can often do it!  It’s all about the attitude.

And now, the singing.  A lot of your score is determined by those first eight bars, so make sure they're as engaging and flawless as possible.  Don't over-rehearse it, but make sure it's within your skill level so you can execute the plan every time, and make sure the plan itself is designed to make the appropriate impression.  The next most important part of the song is the end, because people tend to remember what the saw first, and the last thing they saw (a.k.a. the law of recency and primacy).  The rest of the performance is kind of "compressed" in the brain, and tends to be a bit of a memory muddle.  I know it's common sense, but if you do nothing else, nail the intro, and nail the tag.

Finally, it kind of goes without saying, but every performance is judged by someone!  Usually the audience.  So if you're not the competitive type, all this information will still work for you.

Next in the series, the role of skill and technique.  Stay tuned.

If you are involved with an organization that dabbles in competitive art, I guarantee there is a powerful mythology built up around judges.  They are special.  They are not like you and me.  They can watch a whole performance, compare each moment to an ideal model, calculate the differences with unflagging precision, add them up and distill it into a number.  They are never wrong.  Like the oddly mutated ship captains in Dune, they do what they do by a kind of magic that we cannot hope to understand.

OK, wake up – you’re dreaming!

First of all, although the judges talk about an ideal model, there is no such beast.  The ideal model is an abstract concept.  How could there be an ideal model when every performance is unique?  No judge can know ahead of time what your performance would look like if it were perfect – that’s nonsense.  There is no ideal quartet sound, because every voice is unique.  There is no ideal musical approach – that is the realm of creativity.  So before we do anything else, let’s take the judges off their mysterious pedestal.  They are human.  They have been trained to watch an ensemble and give out the “right score” meaning a score that is as close as possible to all the other judges’ scores in their category.  But they arrive at this number more through a holistic, intuitive sense (read the judging manual and look for the phrase “your lifetime of musical experience”) than some scientific, repeatable and accurate process.  We’re attempting to measure the impact of art here, not calculate pi, so it can only be subjective.

And since the poor judges are human and therefore inherently intuitive, emotional creatures, they know what you’re supposed to score, more or less, before you even start singing.  They are not wired up differently from you and me, and the universal human tendency is to make a snap judgment, and then collect evidence to rationalize that judgment.  So if the judge sees a quartet that looks and acts like a group that scores in the A level, they are expecting an A level performance, and they will gather evidence to support that foregone conclusion.  People hate to be wrong.  Opinions have inertia.  They may adjust their score based on what you actually do, but usually no more than five points in either direction.

Don't believe me?  Imagine you're a judge.  There you are in the pit, in a darkened theater, holding a pencil, and facing a blank scoresheet.  The master of ceremonies comes to the podium and announces the next quartet.  “Can I have the doors closed please.  Ladies and gentlemen, representing the Seneca Land district, please welcome The Allentown Four!”  The audience applauds a bit tentatively as four men between 70 and 85 years of age walk slowly in from the wings, dressed in black pants and white shirts, with red sequin bow ties.  Their shoes and belts are mismatched. One is dragging an oxygen tank.  What do you expect is their maximum score?

Now imagine another quartet.  The master of ceremonies comes to the podium and announces them, “Can I have the doors closed please.  Ladies and gentlemen, representing the Mid Atlantic District, please welcome Crossfire!”  (Disclaimer: This might be the name of a real quartet - I don't know, I just like the name.)  The audience started clapping and chanting “Cross Fire! Cross Fire!” in rhythm, five minutes before they came on stage.  Now the audience leaps to their feet and screams and whoops and applauds with enthusiasm.  The quartet walks energetically and confidently on stage.  They are all between 30 and 35 years of age, slim and attractive, wearing casual black suits.  They radiate confidence and humility as they accept the audience’s heartfelt applause.  After gesturing for the applause to die down, they gather at the microphone…”  What do you think they will score?

If you follow this blog, you know that I went through this very exercise not long ago.  It's remarkable how accurate this method is.

So as just one example of their humanity, let's agree that the judges can’t avoid having an impression of your score before you even start singing.  In the barbershop world, this reality is captured in the judges training.  They are trained to make an initial mark on the scoresheet to represent their initial impression, and they won’t move the mark very far from that original point.  If you think I'm making it up, ask a judge!  It goes without saying that you want that impression to be higher than your “real skill level” if possible, not lower.  And that is the topic of our next article.