One of the sweetest things in life is when we finally get to cross something off of our bucket list – and I had that pleasure this past Saturday when I FINALLY did my first stint as a judge for Solo & Ensemble music contest. It seems like it has been a hundred years that Solo & Ensemble has been a big part of my life, whether in preparing my private high school students or playing piano for various competitors … and for quite a long time now, I’ve watched the judges in action and wondered what it would be like to sit where they do and be the person who offers constructive criticism and decides what everybody gets for a rating.
Oddly enough, what made me so eager to become a judge was after watching the best judges in action – and the worst judges, as well … which makes no sense, but it’s true. I should hasten to add that the vast majority of WSMA*-approved judges that I have seen in action at Solo & Ensemble have been perfectly competent, and most have commendably dispatched the primary responsibilities of a Solo & Ensemble judge, which are (at least as I understand it) …. A) to make each and every young competitor feel welcome and comfortable … B) to be a focused, attentive observer of each and every performance … 3) to offer up helpful comment- both oral and written- that will be helpful as well as encouraging …. and D) to assign a rating to each and every performance with fairness.
I think I would add to that list that it is the responsibility of the judge to make the moment about the student and not about the judge – and this is where a small handful of judges have left me a bit infuriated because they seemed bound and determined to rob the student or students of what should be the undivided attention of everyone in the room. I have heard judges regale the room with stories that have very little if anything to do with the matter at hand …. or go out of their way to crack jokes or in other ways to steal focus for themselves …. or engage in shameless name-dropping such as “when I was a student at Juilliard” or “My good friend Renee Fleming once told me” …. or will sing long passages of the piece as demonstrations of how it should be done. (A few notes would be fine- but not entire sections of a song, in their entirety!) I can think of two or three judges I have seen at contest who engage in such shenanigans and it drives me crazy upon crazy – and every time I have seen that sort of thing, I have desperately wanted to dump the judge right out of their chair and take their place. There have also been instances where I have heard a judge offer up advice that was either completely wrong-headed – or painfully pointless or obvious- or unkindly phrased- and those are probably the moments that have bothered me the most and tempted me to shed my normally affable personality and intervene in no uncertain terms.
Fortunately, this has involved a very very small number of judges over the years. The vast majority have done what they were supposed to do- and done it very well. And then there is somebody like Tremper High School choral director Polly Amborn …. who is, in the interest of full disclosure, is my sister-in-law …. who is the Cadillac of contest judges. I have not had all that many opportunities to watch Polly in action, but in every instance that I have seen her in this setting I have been profoundly impressed and even touched by how beautifully she does this. And one of the things I most admire about Polly’s judging is that she achieves what strikes me as an absolutely perfect blend of friendly sweetness, encouraging the young person, couching critical comments in gentle terms …. with a crisp, professional, slightly businesslike tone and approach that I think can be very helpful to the student and which models for them how competitions like this should be approached. I have thought more than once that I wish there was a way to extract whatever it is that makes Polly such a great judge, put it in a bottle, and spray it on every WSMA judge as their walking to their site to begin the day …. because I want every young person (including my own private students) to be judged by someone who will be kind/patient/encouraging/positive AND meticulous/focused/fair/demanding of excellence.
And by the way, I have to say that something that has warmed my heart has been when I have had the opportunity to see people with whom I have worked as students now in the position of being the judge in the room. Alyssa (Baylen) Turner, Paul Marchese and Rita (Torcaso) Gentile are three such former students who have greatly impressed me as judges. (And of course it’s also very strange – and wonderful – to see former students of mine like Fletcher Paulsen or Ryan Anderson or Keri Bieri, now teachers themselves, bringing students of their own to contest. I’m not sure I will ever get used to the sweet delight of seeing the baton passed like that.
Anyway, it was about 4 or 5 years ago that I really started to get serious about wanting to get accredited as a WSMA judge for Solo & Ensemble. One thing that made it a more workable goal to pursue is that Carthage by that point had two staff pianists who began accompanying many of the weekend recitals for which I had needed to play. Back in those days, the thought of clogging up my weekends with another obligation would have sent me right over the edge. But in recent years, with my weekends not quite so crazy, the thought of taking two or three Saturdays to judge for WSMA sounded very doable as well a nice change of pace. So I signed up for the fall judge’s workshop that Polly hosts at Tremper every fall, in which current as well as prospective judges gather with a representative from WSMA to go over the basic tenets of judging as well as any rule changes that it’s important for judges to know. The workshop always includes an opportunity to actually do some sample judging, with several different young people coming in to perform as though it were an actual – so we can practice writing comments, giving verbal comments, and giving them a numerical rating … and we compare notes after the fact. Once all of that is done, we need to go on the WSMA’s website and take an online quiz so they can assess our understanding of the rules. If we pass, then the final step is to return to the website and let WSMA know what Saturdays of the next year we are available to judge.
My first time around, everything went well until that last part. I’m not sure how, but I managed to screw up my notification to them of when I would be available – and because they never received that information, they never scheduled me for any judging assignments …. and by the time I had figured out my screw up, all of the judging slots had already been filled. Needless to say, I got a little technical support for myself the next time around and managed to navigate the website a bit more successfully and get done what I was supposed to do. And lo and behold, the long-awaited email eventually arrived with the great news that I had been assigned to judge Solo & Ensemble in East Troy, which is about 40 minutes from Racine. I was thrilled.
It was only as the contest date approached that I began to wonder what I had gotten myself into. Two things in particular made me nervous. First of all, I agreed to judge in a room that was split between voice competitors and piano competitors … but then started wondering if I was going to be judging a succession of hotshot piano virtuosos playing the Prokofiev Third Piano Concerto! What helpful, constructive criticism could I even hope to have for a student like that, once I had sputtered out “that was amazing!” Fortunately for me, the calibre of pianists I heard was much more what one would expect from a Solo & Ensemble contest in East Troy, WI – and lo and behold, I had something pretty helpful to say to most of them. (It helped that I had personally played several of the pieces performed that day.) And it also helped that although most of the competitors who played for me did Class A pieces (the highest level of difficulty) I also heard several young pianists play Class B and even Class C- and the comments one makes to those pianists can and should be focused on the basics. And when it was all said and done, I enjoyed the piano students every bit as much as I enjoyed the singers – and I feel really good about what I had to say to each and every one of them. (By the way, I was a little bit surprised …. and very, very pleased …. to see that nearly half of the piano students I heard on Saturday were boys. Whoever the piano teacher in Jefferson is, she seems to have a knack for drawing and retaining boys into her piano studio – and doing great things with them. I only mention it because in just about every other corner of the known universe, the ratio of girls to boys playing piano is nowhere near 50-50, but it seems to be in Jefferson.) At any rate, I was impressed with all of the young women and men who played for me – and in this age when it feels like fewer and fewer kids are studying piano, what I saw in East Troy was very gratifying indeed.
Of course, I was especially excited to be hearing young singers …. but I was nervous there as well. With the singers, it wasn’t that I was afraid of hearing singers of such high calibre that I would be unable to offer them any constructive criticism. In fact, I was worried about the opposite … that I would be hearing very young, hesitant, amateurish singers light years behind the assured, skilled singers with which I work at Carthage. I fretted that I would be listening to a long succession of shy junior high or middle school students who were scared to death and/or rather disinterested in the experience. I think that would have been frustrating – and also boring. And I think for such performances, I might have been hard-pressed to come up with meaningful comments.
But boy, was I wrong! Every singer I heard was either very well prepared, significantly talented, or both. And with every single performance, I found all kinds of things to talk about- striking what I hope was a good balance between comments like “that was great… I like your voice…. what a terrific piece of music” and comments like “I’m not sure you know what these Italian words mean … it’s important for you to sing without doing quite so much physical thrashing around …. Your high note was flat.” The best thing was that never once did I feel like I had to fake my words of encouragements. Everyone I heard was talented and had potential. There was not one single person to whom I was even slightly tempted to say “maybe you need to think of giving up choir and take up pottery instead.” Everybody sounded like and carried themselves like a singer – and hearing such an interesting cavalcade of singers of every stripe was absolute joy. It was also nice that most of the singers I heard were in the classical division, where I think I had the most to offer as a judge – but wow, I also heard some very fine musical theater performances that really knocked my socks off. There was also a treble barbershop quartet that was one of the best things I heard all day- and I told them so. What a joy.
Of course, the central challenge of being a judge is having something meaningful to say that is going to make a difference for the better for these young people and their musical exploits. The real trick is to offer something substantive without getting too complicated. (There simply isn’t enough time to open up a complex can of worms.) I think there’s also the matter of simple humility; I am hearing young musicians who are basically complete strangers to me, and I am in no position to really know who they are or what their capabilities are. All you can do is act on a combination of your own expertise and instincts and hope that what you say will be helpful. Whether or not I managed to do that is probably not for me to judge – but the fact that two different teachers took a moment to thank me for my critiques made me feel like maybe I did …. and that left me with with a very warm sense of deep satisfaction.
Probably the hardest part of the day was when a talented young man sang one of the trickiest songs in the standard Italian art song book, “Come raggio di sol.” I sang it as a freshman in college and could remember vividly how hard it was to master this song – and I’ve taught it enough times over the years to be reminded quite vividly of this song’s intrinsic difficulty. And unfortunately, the young man I heard sing this song had not managed to learn any facet of it – both the words and the music (especially rhythm) were laced with dozens and dozens of errors. As a teacher of young men, I take very seriously the challenge of helping them to feel comfortable as singers as to continue pursuing it even when things go wrong or when they are at that age when so many boys, for whatever reason or reasons, begin to feel self-conscious and less enthusiastic about singing. But that sensitivity cannot translate into giving a boy a high rating that they have not earned. But I made sure on my ballot to spell out how impressed I was by his voice and that I sincerely hoped to hear him again sometime in the future with a song he had managed to learn more securely.
I think what was coolest about the day was how incredibly and completely natural it felt to be a judge. After my first competitor finished – (a very gifted pianist whose performance of a Rachmaninoff prelude was one of the best things I heard all day) I just started talking … and it was a little bit of an out-of-body experience, as though part of me was wondering “who is that who’s talking?” It was me, and it felt just great – and as I was talking, this young woman was standing there attentively taking in all that I was saying to her. It felt great. And it continued to feel great all day long. My only regret was that it was as short a day as it was (I was done before 3:00) … and that I will not have this pleasure again for another year or so (unless someone has to cancel and I am free to pinch hit- which I would gladly do.) So what I got was what amounts to a tantalizing taste of a joy that I hope I will get to have again and again in the years to come.