Tips to Remember Before Competition Season Begins
By David Lambert, TMAA President | Tuesday, October 06, 2009 12:23 PM
We are once again well into the school year, and competitions will soon begin for bands, orchestras and choirs. As these events are set into motion, many of you will be asked to judge performances for organizations throughout the state. This will require every adjudicator to approach each event with decorum and professionalism.
TMAA is a professional organization that has made great strides in creating a cadre of adjudicators who demonstrate their dedication to the profession, and their fair approach to evaluating each adjudicated performance. We want to continue that perception and improve every year. With that in mind, I would like to provide a list of some of the things to remember when adjudicating these events.
• Re-read the rules for the event you are going to adjudicate. Rules change and we forget. It is always a good idea to re-read the rules each year and understand your role in the process. Sight-reading judges should know who gets extra time and how much. Too often, mistakes occur that could be avoided if time had been taken to review the rules and guidelines.
• Review the rubric for the event. Rubrics are relatively new to concert and sight-reading and should be reviewed prior to each event regardless of how many years one has served as an adjudicator. These are a great tool that can be helpful in determining a rating, especially when an adjudicator is “on the fence.” In such cases, the rubric can be indispensable.
• Think of the language of the rating you give the performance. Was the performance superior, excellent, average (mediocre), below average, or poor? Adjudicators, who think in terms of the language rather than the division number, have a better chance of giving the appropriate rating.
• Leave your newspaper, magazines, and paperwork at home. If an adjudicator is reading the newspaper or magazine between performances, it leaves the impression, right or wrong, that there are more important things than what he or she was hired to do for the student performers.
• Turn your cell phone off…PLEASE! There is nothing more distracting, and disruptive, than to have a cell phone ring during a performance. It is even worse, if the call is answered.
• Leave your computer at home unless you are using it to write and print your critiques. Never bring your work to an event you are adjudicating. If you have that much to do, you should not have accepted the assignment.
• Don’t fraternize with directors before their organization has performed. No matter how innocent this may be, it leaves a terrible impression with parents and other directors. Too often, judges are taken to dinner by the host school director. This can be seen as that school’s organization having an unfair advantage because of this fraternization. The judges often need to be taken to dinner, just not by a director whose students have yet to perform.
• Never write a hurtful comment. Take your time and weigh your words wisely when writing your critique. Judges’ comments should be helpful in nature. Give students ways to improve their overall musical abilities. Don’t just tell the performers what they did wrong; tell them how to correct problems that consistently occurred during the performance. Address how the students can improve as musicians overall rather than citing only problems and errors that may have occurred in selections performed that day.
• Never base your rating on the past performances of a group you hear. Judge the performance that is heard that day. Nothing else should matter. The organization may have a reputation that is stellar, but the performance given at the event being judged can be the only thing used in determining the rating that day. This is also true for sight-reading. Nothing should be used to determine a rating except how the students performed the music.
• Don’t try to correct a noisy audience or other distraction in the concert hall. Have the contest chairperson take care of the problem.
• Review the Sight-reading Question and Answer page on the UIL Web site. This is a very helpful document and can provide answers to questions that could occur in the sight-reading room.
• Remember, there are five ratings that you can use to evaluate an organization’s performance. Too often, the bottom two ratings are used very sparingly. Perhaps if they were used more often an average rating (Division Three) would not carry such a negative connotation.
• Be aware that no performance is perfect. Your rating should be based on the frequency of errors and the how quickly students recover from errors.
• Finally be aware of YOUR audience. Many of the people in the auditorium, stadium, or sight-reading room will be watching you to see what you do and any reaction that you may have to their child’s performance. Never confer with another judge until the ratings have been turned in to the office for tabulation. Sometimes the most innocent discussion can have a negative impact on a parent or director in the audience.
I am sure there will be more articles this year from other members of the TMAA Executive Committee that may address professionalism. I hope so. How adjudicators conduct themselves and the impression left to parents, directors and students cannot be over emphasized. Every written comment and action between performances makes a statement, either negative or positive, on our profession. Let’s all make an extra effort to be sure that the impression we leave is a positive one.