Music Monday - Musings on a choral festival

I volunteered at a choral festival yesterday. The festival is an annual event for government schools here in Western Australia and yesterday took place on a beautiful cold, sunny Sunday after weeks of rain.

Over the course of the day, we heard 20+ choirs, all a high standard, and several which were memorable for the best of reasons. Stylistically, the repertoire ranged from Gregorian Chant through to beat-boxing, with lots between.

 How wonderful for students to hear excellence in performance from a choir in quite another style to their own! 

There was a real sense of ‘family’ and inclusivity within each choir.

The day was not without its challenges though. As always, choir directors received last minute emails and text messages from parents who decided spontaneously to do something else on that sunny Sunday. (Would they tell the sporting team coach that their kid was not going to play that day, I wondered?) And of course, sickness precluded some students from attending – and presented stress for the directors when those students were on key parts in the ensemble. One of my colleagues and friends had to stand in for 2 missing parts in a beautiful 11 part unaccompanied ‘Magnificat’.

The festival is non-competitive. Choirs receive comments from an adjudicator and receive a ‘grading’ – good, excellent, outstanding. But there are no winners – a healthy thing, since the point of the festival is the opportunity to perform and hear choral singing in many genres. 

However, the grading system creates an unofficial sense of competitiveness which is not always in the spirit of the festival. A grading of ‘excellent’ is interpreted as ‘average’ (since it is the middle grade in a scale of good, excellent, outstanding). If an adjudicator’s comments included something like “this was excellent singing” there would be a sense of achievement – but as a grade it can bring disappointment. 

Are we so geared to grading in arts education that we can’t accept just a critique from an adjudicator?

In conclusion, another colleague remarked that the football derby playing that day (a game between the two state teams) had attracted much news coverage and thousands in attendance at the stadium. But here we were running a government run music festival with zero news cover. Yet another indication of arts v sports in Australia? Wouldn’t it be fantastic to have arts + sports!