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From the NY TImes:

Piano Competitions' Dark Side

I don't think there is much new here. The arguments against these high level competitions are well known and well rehearsed. But I'm fascinated by the welling up of reform ideas from the players themselves.

P.S. I was unaware of the incident with Schiff. That intrigued me.

Very interesting, piano*dad! I loved the closing quote by Prosseda: "The public doesn't want us to play the standard way perfectly. The public wants us to make them cry.”

I was also intrigued by the accusation made of secret vote-trading among judges. That seems like a pretty serious ethical violation, but no source was attributed for it, nor was any indication given of how widespread that practice is.

I wonder if any of the competitions will eventually fade away because of the huge number of them. The other thing too perhaps the larger conservatories should establish jury and competition standards like they have for juried figure skating and other sports events. This may also cut back on the hogwash that goes with these events.

John

Good article! I agree that there needs to be some absolute standards for judging (conduct in particular) like there are in figure skating (thanks, John!) and gymnastics.

I like the Pridonoff solution.

There is a lot of things that they can do to improve upon the problem. I was shocked at the number of asain pianists. I thought it would be higher then thirty-five percent. I thought it would be closer to fifty percent. That was close to the ratio I seen when I was in school or doing auditions, competitions ect ect. Though I do leave out Europe.

Even if the competitions were blind. It would still leave the problem of going for the fastest.

i have heard before about the vote trading and i'm not in competitions.

i had read the article yesterday and figured somebody would post it here. I love following the van Cliburn competition.. that would be so neat to be so talented.

Do you really think that? I doubt your favorite performances are only the fastest ones. I know mine aren't. There may be a problem in that a judge who has a student competing will recognize his playing, but he shouldn't be a judge anyway

I believe that it would only solve one performance. How does not seeing the performer change if your picking them by speed?

Why would any reputable musician pick winners by speed? I have seen no evidence that musicians are particularly impressed by that feature above all the other features that define musicianship.

Again, who picks a performance for speed? What are you suggesting? Are you saying there should be a way to keep judges from picking the fastest? Is that really a problem?

No, just saying for those who believe it is a problem. Such as the president of that one competition mentioned in the artical, blind judging is only the first step. But I guess her competition had no reputable musicians.

I have enough reservations about piano competitions without contemplating them being judged like a figure skating contest. What an appalling thought.

Perhaps reforms should be along the lines of instituting a panel of judges that is different each year, none of whom are known in advance, and none of whom know one another, and are disallowed from talking to one another. And maybe in this panel of, say, five judges, only two should be pianists. The others might be a violinist, a poet, an actor or a playwright, maybe even a photographer. Maybe there should be no system of judging, and no accountability whatsoever, total subjectivity. They simply vote for whomever they like best. They list the top three in order of preference, and use instant run off voting to determine the winner.

Tomasino

It's interesting you should mention ice skating, because that system is famously broken. Torvill and Dean's amazing Let's Face the Music and Dance routine for their Olympic return at Lillehammer took the roof off the stadium but came third because of a technicality.

You can't judge art by the rules of sport.

Exactly the problem: what do you judge it by then? The number of people in the audience with teary eyes? Bartok may have had the right attitude - just don't participate in an inartistic process.

Well, do keep in mind who said it, and that Tureck isn't around to tell her side of the story. Not that I am any great fan of Tureck and the anecdote could very well be true, but still, it seems a bit uncalled for to present it as something like a fact.

Also some people pick emotions over technically sound pieces. That's why you see Lang Lang with his over-the-top gestures to impress the crowd when inside his head he could be faking it. IMHO, in practice when no one is looking, nobody sways around with fake emotion because nobody is watching them during practice. Only during performance when thousands are watching do they sway to move the audience and give it that added effect.

Thank you for the link to the article Piano Dad.

Any attempt to micromanage the criteria for judging will fail. But that doesn't seem to be what the more serious reform proposals are about. There are clear incentive issues that need to be addressed so that the basic integrity of the judging isn't the issue. Reasonable people may disagree about which reforms are most important, but I suspect most of us can agree that certain existing facets of contemporary judging are deeply problematic. These problematic issues might include things like judges communicating with each other (explicitly or by body language) and judges rating their own students.

Blind judging is one option, though there are problems with that as well.

If some of the basic ethical conflicts are removed or smoothed, we'll still have the fundamental issue of how one judges among all these truly remarkable players. But that's life. I think the pianists themselves understand that the judgments being made about them are quite subjective. They can live with that. Getting slammed by judge X who wants to make more room on the podium for their own student Y is the bigger problem.

This is quite true. And it also applies to the quote from the disgruntled organizer who complained about judges favoring players who play loud and fast. That is not a 'fact' either, even though the article gives these opinions almost the weight of facts.

Contestants anonymity should be compulsory!

and that wouldn't even sve half the problems.


I just don 't believe in piano cmpetitions.