George Waddell: On the Hidden Consequences of Music Competitions

[00:01:30] Noa KAGEYAMA: I got an email from a teacher a couple weeks ago who explained that her students have generally done pretty well in the competitions that she enters them in, and she's continued to enter them in competitions because her younger students especially seem to enjoy them and gain confidence and are more motivated practice and become better.

But in the days leading up to the competitions, she confessed that she starts to have these sleepless nights where she starts worrying about how they're gonna do on the day of, and not in terms of, you will people think of my students if they don't play well? But more in terms of how her students will respond or feel if they don't play well, or if they don't get a top prize.

Like how could these experiences potentially be damaging to them, or how might they maybe even lose their love for music if they don't win a prize? So I know that competitions have been a point of debate for a long time. I think I read somewhere that even in the 1800's, Mendelsson was not a fan of competitions and Bartok said something like competitions or for horses, not artists. But obviously they still seem to be pretty popular and some students do, I think find them to be a source of motivation.

So George, from reading some of what you've written, I get the sense that the issue is not this narrow black and white question of are competitions good or bad, but maybe even a much larger, bigger and broader question that has to do with the industry itself and audiences as well.

And and I some sense of what you describe in your writing having grown up in this world from an early age, but I never myself won a big competition or had a manager and certainly didn't have the experience of having to navigate the professional side of the industry in my teenage years. So I'm lucky to have Trisha here as a co-host today, as her professional career began at an age when I was still like going to summer camps and riding my bike through the wood and getting poison ivy and trying to avoid practicing.

So so I know you have some thoughts on this as well. I wonder if you'd like to get the conversation started.

[00:03:23] Tricia PARK: Sure. Thanks Noa. So George, I was wondering as myself, as somebody who identifies as a former child performer, I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you wish everybody understood about classical music competitions and more generally the ways performance opportunities are distributed in the classical music industry.

[00:03:45] George WADDELL: Sure. Well, I think when it comes to competitions, I think one thing we of course do have to acknowledge is that, some things that we might think of as a competition are sort of necessary in our profession. There are cases where there is only one seat available in the orchestra, where there is only one place available in the music school where perhaps the orchestra can only take on one soloist for particular concerts.

That there is a competitive atmosphere in that there are a limited number of opportunities in the profession and in the educational pathway. And many people may want access to that opportunity. So of course there's gonna be some element of competition there, people putting themselves forward.

Someone has to make a call, someone has to say, you get the job, you get the seat, you get the performance opportunity. I think where this question of competitions becomes important is where it's not the outcome of the competition that becomes what we sort of present to the audience. Here is the soloist chosen for the stage, or here is the new concertmaster of the orchestra, but it's the process of the competition that in some ways becomes the spectacle.

Let's watch these young musicians perform. Let's watch them compete. Let's watch them be judged where the judgment itself becomes the act of interest, the act of entertainment perhaps. And then sort of raises the question of, in competitions in that sense, who is that truly for?

Is it truly for the benefit of the artist or indeed, is it for the benefit of the entertainment of the audience or indeed the promotion of the competition itself and the people who, with the best intentions at heart, surely, are hosting that competition.

So thinking of your question of what would we want people to know is well that, yes, absolutely, there is a, again, that sort of competitive spirit that may sort of run through the classical music industry or indeed any industry where there are more people interested in the opportunity than there are opportunities for them.

And and maybe that's a problem that can be addressed and maybe we'll talk about that. But at the same time, you know, when we think of this, that sort of stereotypical classical music competition, what I would hope people think is that is not necessarily necessary, that this idea that there is such a thing as the best pianist and the second best pianist and the third best pianist.

I would hope that we might all sort of question that assumption and perhaps not have our audiences think that that is some sort of underlying reality that our competitions are revealing, that we're perhaps inventing that reality and the consequences for the industry and indeed the performers involved in it. Some can be positive indeed. There can perhaps be negative consequences of that as well.

[00:06:27] Tricia PARK: That brings to mind for me, I think I was about 16 or 17 and I had already been playing for a few years at that point and had never gotten a bad review. And the very first one that I got was very public. It was actually in the Strad and it was written by a female critic who was older and white.

And as it turns out, it was a very short review. And she reviewed a handful of us, we were all girls, Asian and some of whom were not, and decided that this was an opportunity to actually compare us. And I did not stack up favorably to some of the other folks and it was very much a sort of ranking experience. And that to this day has really stayed with me. I think that that's one of the things that I found really challenging to get over. And a lot of what I came away with reading from your article and also the report you shared with us, was how really fragile young people are.

And yet we are in this discipline that requires a certain amount... well, we need to start young enough to really develop all the sort of like physiological musculature and everything that is required similarly to elite athletes. So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the commonly held beliefs about competitions that you passionately disagree with? What do you think about ranking, what alternate ways are there to be discerning but also not crush the spirits of young musicians, and that that experience can have a really long tail for the performer into adulthood.

[00:08:12] George WADDELL: Absolutely. And, and I think you're quite right that I, I think it's, particularly when we're thinking of young musicians and, and indeed quite young musicians, musicians at the early stages of their development, where, I think we've, again, really have to be careful in thinking about, why are we doing this?

Why are we deciding a winner? I mean, I think back to the various, very earliest days of my training, so I, I trained as a pianist. Initially I started at, at a very young age. Like many do, I was very lucky to have parents to, uh, Get me kickstarted, me and my siblings. I, I come from a very rural part of, of Central Canada, so I grew up on a farm outside of a village of 700 people, about an hour's drive from the nearest grand piano or traffic light as I like to say, relatively isolated from other musicians, other performers, certainly other sort of classical pianists. And as often happens in these small towns, these small communities, there was a local sort of music festival where all the towns would come together and everyone would sort of get together and play and they'd play at their grade levels of all the different instruments and the school bands and the pianists and the singers and all the, this things.

And it was great. It was a festival, it was a celebration of music. And all of these young musicians would come along often from a very young age, and we would play, and they would bring in an adjudicator and all of a sudden that celebration turned into a judgment. All of a sudden marks were being handed out, winners and losers being decided, trophies being handed out or indeed not handed out.

And I think back to those early formative years. And I remember being, on the one hand sort of excited as, you know, a seven year old, an eight year old and nine year old, the chance to get up on stage and play for friends and family and people in the town and surrounding towns and things like this, but also quite nervous, you know, worried about, oh, well what are they going to say about me?

Are they gonna make me sort of then go up and play it again and try to make me better in front of all these eyes? What if I don't win? I, I was very fortunate at that age, with particular help from good teachers and, and very supportive parents that I generally won these small little things, but that, that you would then go back, well, what if I don't this year? There's now these expectations. But I also remember every year seeing the number of people that I was playing against. And again, how awful in music to think, we're not playing with people, we're playing against people, but those people I was competing against coming from the other towns.

It was a smaller number each year. And I remember one year in particular, there was a young boy I would, sort of play against every year. And, and the adjudicator asked him, well, do, do you play hockey? And he said, yes. Cause of course all young boys, uh, in this part of Canada play a bit of hockey.

And he said, yes. And the juror said, you know, maybe you should stick to hockey. Well, he didn't come back the next year. And you just sort of think, well, what are we doing here? Is the goal of this truly to decide which eight year old is the best pianist, as if that means something? Or are we trying to foster and encourage and celebrate a love and learning of music in these small communities. And then I also think of, this particular festival, they would offer a scholarship there. There's a wonderful music camp, at the Peace Gardens and the border between North Dakota and Manitoba. And you can go there in the summer and you can learn and study and collaborate and there was a scholarship available and, and my, my parents always encouraged me to, to put my name in for it and I refused because the idea of spending a week with other pianists, competition, was terrifying to me.

It wasn't until I went to study at university, due to my undergraduate training that I realized, oh, I can spend time with people like me, with fellow lovers of music and classical music and people who have identified themselves throughout their lives by doing this. But even then, when I think back that first year there, I didn't spend any time with the classical pianists.

They were my competition. I couldn't even wrap my head around the idea that a musician could be a colleague and a friend and a collaborator, that it was your competition. It was this quite intimidating thing. I spent time with, the music education students and those in the jazz departments and anything except those fellow classical pianists I was terrified of.

By the second year, I got over that and we'd started working together and these kind of things. But, But yeah, at that young age, at that formative age, establishing what is it to learn music and play music. And as you say, there's the physiological aspects that we're bringing online at this point thinking about setting good habits so that we don't, um, run into injury and, and pain later down the line. But there's also the psychological aspects of what does it mean to get on stage and what does it mean to share and, and make music. So again, one can debate the relative merits of competitions and what they bring at later stages in the career but I think particularly when we're dealing with young children, and not only whether they're psychologically prepared for the idea of winning and losing something that is inherently subjective as music is. But also just for what sort of baseline are we establishing and, and what it means to make music and collaborate and whether you're allowed to, do you deserve to be on that pedestal where you get to call yourself a musician or not?

That there are those who deserve to play in the competition and those who don't? And is that actually the atmosphere we want to set? And then are we therefore surprised when we see dwindling numbers of children taking up and sticking with music lessons, the, the way we're seeing all over the world.

[00:13:13] Tricia PARK: I really resonate with what you were talking about, your own experience when you were in a performance degree of moving away from your fellow performers, your fellow classical pianists, and naturally kind of gravitating towards jazz musicians and music education majors. And cuz that was my experience too.

Some of why I got an MFA later in life was that after this very narrowly focused, really early professionalization that I experienced in my music making, I discovered that there were people who were in music and particularly actors or people who were in different genres of music making, where it was much more collaborative.

It was much more about sharing information, especially the traditions that are more orally based and less like scripted. And that was so attractive to me and so I still find that that's really added a lot for my own experience of creativity, having dabbled in other arenas.

The other thing that brings to mind is, as a teacher, it's taken me a long time to understand that the people who are on these panels are also human beings. And the only time I understood that was after I started to serve on those panels, which of course was much later in my career relative to when I started.

And so when students and other folks come up and ask about that, or they get really wound up tight before an audition or before a competition, I really wish that there was a way for me to inject that sort of matrix style, like upload that understanding that these are, these are just real people as well and that they want you to succeed, but that it's the system that's really difficult and that success and failure is not ever really quite as black and white as it seems to, especially the young person and especially in the current framework where at least in my experience, we don't get a lot of feedback actually afterwards, if we do, when in competitions or in my case, a lot of concert reviews, it didn't feel like it was an opportunity for improvement. It felt like you were either good or bad, you were good enough or not good enough.

And that's really difficult to not take personally, especially as a young person, because we identify with what we're doing. Like our identity is so tied to what we do. And so my question, is what do you wish that performers, especially young performers could understand earlier on about the nature of success and failure in competitions and auditions?

[00:15:46] George WADDELL: Hmm. I suppose for me, it, at, at some level, it goes actually at a higher level to what success and failure look like in competitions and indeed auditions. But what does success look like as a musician? What does success look like in our pathway to becoming a professional musician? A colleague of mine at the Royal College of Music, Rosie Perkins, in her PhD work, she looked at the culture of a conservatoire or a conservatory or a music school, sort of what goes on, what are the things that happens between the classes and indeed between the notes and one of the things that she highlighted is a major theme that sort of runs through these places where we spend so much of her time in the path to becoming a musician is the so-called performance hierarchy and this idea that the greatest thing that a musician can achieve is to be a performer and indeed to perform at the highest level as a soloist or as the first chair, or whatever that might be, and everything is secondary to that. So to be a performer is the best and one can then step down from that and be an educator, an academic and administrator, and all these other indeed wonderful and valuable and essential ways of engaging with music.

But in the department where I work the Center for Performance Science, we of course work a lot with musicians being based at the Royal College of Music, but we also cut across a wide range of areas of performance. We look for the parallels. So one area we work in a lot is sport, as you would imagine, lots of athletes and a very obvious form of performance and indeed parallels with what we do as musicians.

We work a lot with them. Well, what we'd call over here are football players, indeed are soccer players. And of course, young children when they really want to be a footballer, well, they dream of playing in the top leagues, being the Premier league and back home, they want to go play for the NHL or the, the CFL, the NFL, you imagine being the big league sports player.

But of course, only a tiny fraction of those athletes will ever make it into those leagues. I mean, that's just mathematics. There's only so many spots that can hold it. But does that mean well, no one should play sports. And indeed, no one should aspire to have a profession in sports. Well, of course not.

There's a huge ecosystem that relies on that of coaches and trainers and teachers and leagues and of all levels and all of the great things that sport does for community. One can see the exact parallel in music where there's many, many ways that we can, indeed need to contribute, to our communities and our society's music.

All the great things that, that music does. Indeed, that's part of the work that we do in our Center for Performance Science is look empirically at the benefits to the economy to our health or mental and physical health, all these things by through engaging with music. So we need to celebrate the many ways it means to successfully contribute to that ecosystem.

But if we're all focused on that small fraction of a fraction of a percent who will play the world's most revered stages and maybe reach that superstar status that everyone points at, well, that's something that then pervades the whole industry. And then you can very easily see, well, how does that fall back into the idea of a competition where to be a great competition means being able to pull out your CV and list this list of wins because that is what it means to be a great musician. Now, I don't want to diminish the great achievements and success of any of that. It simply said, well, that is one path to success and there are many others.

And indeed, it's one of the great challenges we have at a place like the Royal College of Music, where we're very fortunate to receive some of the finest young musicians in the world is that they come in with those ambitions and indeed those expectations and rightfully so. This is sort of what they've been told and the ecosystem they've looked at.

This is why they want to come study at one of the great conservatoires. So it's one of our challenges is to not bring down those ambitions, but to try to bring up the level of that this is what it means to be a great teacher, this is what it means to be a great collaborator, this is one of the many ways that you can engage.

And indeed, when you look at those superstars, well, you'll find that most of them teach and run music schools and help administer arts festivals. They are great not only because of what they can do on the stage, but actually they've built this wide portfolio career. But that's not what these competitions celebrates.

They don't celebrate that portfolio of ability that it actually takes to put together a successful music career. We celebrate one very specific aspect of it and indeed, one struggles to find the equivalent celebrations of those other skills, and then you can then sort of see why there can be so much disappointment and heartbreak as people sort of filter then into the many, many ways that they will make incredible contributions to the musical ecosystem.

[00:20:27] Noa KAGEYAMA: Do you get a sense of anything changing culturally in the music world in terms of there being greater openness to the idea of a portfolio career or greater interest among students in teaching or pedagogy or, or any broadening of interests around just performing?

[00:20:44] George WADDELL: I think so. I really do. I think particularly in the various sort of higher education institutes, the music schools in universities, the conservatories, I do think we're seeing that change, we're seeing that sort of portfolio approach to teaching. I mean I can speak for the Royal College of Music cuz that's where I am.

So all of our first year students, they take a module with me on our undergraduate program. They take a module with me on their health and wellbeing preparing for the mental and physical challenges of performance, but also celebrating those, how can this work as musicians actually boost our health.

But in their second year, we have a module on professional skills, thinking about working in professional settings, thinking about speaking on stage. So many musicians, wonderful on stage with their instrument but as soon as you take that instrument away and ask them to speak to an audience, they shrivel.

And of course, there are many opportunities where being a convincing and effective speaker can be very helpful in professional settings. We talk about contracts and legal issues. We talk about taxes and finance and budgeting. We talk about working with the technologies we have now and indeed the technologies coming in the future.

So, I'm area leader in performance science. What that means is I take this sort of scientific, evidence based teaching approaches and look to embed them in the teaching we do, but we're also very lucky to have an area leader and indeed, an area of education at the Royal College of Music, so elevating this act of teaching in all of its forms right alongside that sort of the core mission of what we do there. So I think it's that combination that there is this recognition of the importance of the health and wellbeing of musicians, which includes dealing with this constant stress of that competitive atmosphere.

But then absolutely elevating these other areas and one area I'm particularly excited about and encouraged by is this growing appreciation, as I mentioned before, of the value of music to our health, generally of the health of our society, especially our mental health.

But there is very interesting research finding how listening to and engaging with music can also have very strong effects on our body on helping our immune response and these kind of things. So this idea of music playing a larger role in healthcare systems. And here in the UK we're already seeing this so-called social prescribing where you might go to your doctor and instead of prescribing you a medication, they prescribe you music lessons or concert tickets.

These sort of in its trial stages, but we're seeing more and more research, some of which we do, finding that actually engaging in music in these ways can be as effective as a pharmaceutical. We can imagine a role of musician in healthcare settings, in care settings, in hospitals, in care homes, in schools, in all these places.

And indeed, we've just launched a new module, it's running right now for the first time launched a few weeks ago called Musical Care, where we're now training some of our undergraduate students to go into these care settings and think about what that sort of future career for them will be.

So I think this is very promising. I think as an industry, we're seeing this shift in the celebration of the many ways that musicians can contribute to the society. And it's not new when one goes back into musical history. This is what it meant to be a musician way before the internet or even recordings or even before you were able to travel very much.

Yes, you had the occasional young prodigy being Toured around Europe by their overbearing father or something like this. But for the most part, a musician contributed to their local community and engaged in many ways. And I hope that we actually see more of a return to that, of a celebration of a musician within their community and the goods that they can do there.

And I hope that the sort of atmosphere of competitions and the spectacle around that will follow suit to celebrate and encourage that growth in the industry.

[00:24:23] Tricia PARK: A lot of major international competitions have an age cutoff of about between 32 and 35, and even orchestras, I believe in Europe, some have an age cutoff for how old you can be and still audition for a new job. Unlike ballet dancers or other elite athletes in gymnastics or ice skating, disciplines that I think are similarly structured as the current classical music competition model, we're fortunate as classical musicians that we are actually capable of having performance careers that extend well into our sixties and beyond. Do you think there's a rationale for eliminating upper age limits in competitions and auditions? And if so, what is it?

[00:25:03] George WADDELL: Hmm. That's a really interesting question. I can't speak for the many competitions and orchestras that do this. They'll each have their own reasons. If I had to speculate one of many possible reasons I suspect is it would be looking at when many of these competitions will state or publish, what are their sort of aims, what's their mission, their raison d'etre as a competition?

Well, it's to identify and support the next generation of artists. So I can sort of imagine a rationale there was, we want to limit it to a certain age because we want to give the boost to those earlier in their careers who need it most. That presumably it would be unfair to let seasoned professionals who've had many decades in the industry compete who may not need those resources.

I think there's large assumptions being made there of when a performance career starts and when people need support along those careers. But even going back to that rationale, taking it at its face value, what that in there, what a competition is effectively saying if, okay, the purpose of this competition is to identify the star of the future. What they're saying is, well, what we're not trying to do is identify the number one pianist right now in front of us, assuming that's even possible. Cause if that was the case, well there would be no age limits. Bring in all the pianists. Let's pick the best one. Right?

That is the way sport works. There's not an official age cutoff. People just tend to age out, right? Because of the highly physical nature of most of those fields of activity. But in music, if that's what they want us to do, they could just remove that age. But it's not about finding the best pianist today, right now, at 2:00 PM when the finals tended to happen on a particular Sunday.

It's about trying to predict who's going to be so successful in the future. And I think there's just a few things we need to be careful there. One is this sort of assumption that that is possible, that based on the performance we're seeing in front of us now, we can then infer from that, future performances and a wider area of performance.

From the empirical scientific perspective one can turn to the world of behavioral economics to the Nobel Prize winning Daniel Kahneman. He wrote fabulous book Thinking, Fast and Slow and looked a lot to the biases and heuristics that come into how we make decisions.

And one of the earliest insights he had in his career, one of the earliest of these sort of biases that he helped coin was this idea of what you see is all there is. For example, when you conduct a job interview with someone, perhaps out of that single conversation, you are able to infer, ah, yes, this person is gonna do very well in the job and very well in the organization, and they're gonna stick with us for a long time and they're gonna meet all their metrics and they're just going to, they're gonna tick all those boxes that we need from this person. Perhaps, one has a very effective interview strategy and panelists that are really good at making those predictions. But perhaps maybe all you're actually really good at is seeing what is right in front of you. Is this person really good at having a conversation with you right now? Today? What you see is all there is.

You can't actually make all of these many inferences later on. And indeed, a lot of the work that Kahneman kicked off and many followed, is that actually just as people, just as human beings, we're quite bad at making predictions about the future, particularly predictions based on other people. And that there's a, a wide and growing literature in all the different ways that our brains sort of get in the way when we're trying to not even just predict how someone's going to perform in the future, but actually even just deciding whether or not the performance in front of us was of a particular standard.

And, and we can get into those, the weeds of some that research, if you like. But that's the sort of the wider issue there. And then the second one is sort of linked to what I was saying before is again, if you're trying to predict the great stars of the future, the great musicians of the future is being able to get on stage and play this particular piece of repertoire live this one time, is that everything it takes, I mean, it's a crucial component of it, don't get me wrong, but what about all of that other stuff of the administration of, being able to work in a recording studio, to be able to teach, to be able to manage your schedule, all of those other professional skills that it actually requires to make the career.

And again, one can sort of anecdotally pick through the various stories that were yes indeed some people were very successful, but also what about all those people who won competitions but didn't fit into the industry? And what about all those people that didn't win the competitions, but through combination of their many other skills ended up thriving?

This mission of, oh yes, this is what we're doing, we're going to identify and boost those who want to elevate their careers. Well, I don't mind the boosting part. It's the identifying part. It's the choosing, oh, we're gonna boost you and you, but not you, you, you.

That's the part where I think we all need to be very skeptical and, and we can all look very closely at, is this the best approach? And in particular, shall we do that? Identifying and picking in front of a live audience and make a little bit of a spectacle of it and sell some tickets to watch these people get selected or indeed not.

[00:30:00] Noa KAGEYAMA: I'm sort of struck by a couple things that you said, George. One is the idea of being able to predict which of these terrific musicians in the finals of this huge competition are going to have the best career in the future as being a really difficult, just like you know, in the NFL or NBA, every year, there are a number of prospects who are selected by teams who put all sorts of resources in trying to identify who they think is going to be the best player for them into the future. And it's a very inexact process inexact science and difficult to do. And I was really struck by your 2019 paper in which you went through all this research, and I think it starts out by saying that being able to play well doesn't necessarily translate into being able to judge, or evaluate very well. And there's a Szigeti quote uh, starts off that paper as well, that you share. It does seem from your paper that learning how to evaluate, learning how to critique and learning how to, judge is a skill that we don't generally get a lot of training in.

And so it might be that those things combined lead us into a situation where a lot of folks are maybe discouraged from pursuing music or, or have a, a false sense of what their abilities or prospects are um, at a very early age, which could be detrimental perhaps to continued development?

[00:31:21] George WADDELL: Absolutely. And, now that's the start of what I'll preface what I'm about to say with I don't want to undercut or denigrate the many, many great teachers and the many, many indeed great judges who give invaluable advice and so many boosts and so many sort of wise words and helpful advice for many young musicians.

What I would say is I was very struck by, you know, going back to my early days in my undergraduate training, that first year where I was scared of my fellow pianists, so I was hanging out a lot with the music education group. In fact so much that I ended up marrying one of them years later.

But what really struck me about watching them and indeed my future wife go through this process in parallel. So here I was in the performance program. And then over here you have these educators that are training, in their case for classroom teaching and particularly, in Canada, the wind band sort of training system is in our performance side of the world, we spent so much time honing and mastering our instruments and then sort of begrudgingly went to some academic classes and learned some theory and, and history and that sort of stuff we had to do. Incidentally, I was very lucky that my music school was part of a wider university where they forced you every term to go take a non-music course just to go sort of better yourself.

And there was a lot of grumbling about that. I got very fortunate that I took an intro to psychology course and fell in love with it and it really helped kick off my path in, into the scientific academic world. But anyway, the point here being is that watching us take this very performance heavy approach and indeed feeling very smug about it because remember that performance hierarchy we're the performers, we're the best ones looking potentially down our noses at the education department.

Meanwhile, over in the education department, they were, yes, learning their instrument, but learning a wide variety of instruments cuz they would have to stand in front of a room of teenagers and simultaneously teach a dozen different instruments, which still sort of blows my mind. But they're also taking courses on the philosophy and psychology of assessment and on learning and teaching strategies. They're going deep, deep into the theory, into the practice. They're being put out on placements. They're going out and learning how to teach by teaching and getting advice from teachers in the classroom.

And in some senses looking down their noses at us performers going, yeah, well, at least we're going to get jobs. And indeed, they all did, coming out of their training. So there's this stark difference. Where in the performance world, if you are a performer, that's the best thing. Yeah, you'll be able to do everything else, cause everything else is easier, right? Come judge our competition. Come give this masterclass. Come teach at our school. No teaching training required. We don't need to see a degree, we don't need to see a higher education, certificate in teaching. What we do need to see is a performance degree and experience on stage.

This idea that if you can do it, you can teach it. And those of us who do get in front of classrooms or work with students, I think we know often just through trial and error what a difficult and challenging and very specific skill set it takes to teach. And when we look to other areas where that is explicitly taught and then we come back to ours and go, okay, well as long as you can play, then we'll throw you in there And we'll see how good you are at, at judging at teaching. Well, there's a disparity there. And again, there are some cases, I think rarer than we would like to see where, yes, I think particularly of examiners around the world we have the various sort of examination systems, the ABRSM in Canada, we have the RCM system, there are others available and many of them will offer training for their examiners, how to use their particular rubrics, these kind of things. I hope they wouldn't., to take it poorly to say, well, it's not the equivalent in depth and length of, say, an entire bachelor's degree, for example, that a classroom teacher might have to achieve to do what they have to do.

So perhaps that parity isn't quite there. And so in the research when we look across the history of research in, in this area, particularly sort of research starting in about the nineties and onward, though some of it going back to the seventies, what we see are these studies where you get people to listen to music, to judge music, to give it a grade out of a hundred or whatever we might do, and study after study, sort of worryingly, finding that if you get a bunch of trained musicians together and rank some performances or give those performances scores and then you get people with little to no musical training together, you'll be hard pressed in many cases to find differences between how they achieve those rankings if all you're doing is trying to assign a number to it. Indeed, I ran some studies as part of my PhD where I was looking very particularly at how the visual and another information affected your judgment. So if you pull a face when you make a mistake or the way you walk on stage, how does that affect your overall judgment?

Well, one of the things I did, just to see how it worked in the background was, well, let's get some trained musicians and some non-musicians to judge these and we can see if they react to these things differently. And what I found is, except for a very few exceptions, where something very specific might have triggered one group but not the other, the lines as they kept their score over time as the performance going on, I would ask them to move a slider back and forth and record their judgment.

They were often indistinguishable, so again, I'm not saying we should throw all the judges out and just pull random people off the street to replace them. What I am saying is, in some cases, statistically, you actually probably wouldn't find much difference in the scores. So then the question is, well, what value does that training bring?

And there is indeed value. And where that value is in the so-called diagnostic judgment and the formative judgment. So a researcher Goolsby in I think 1999, he wrote about four kinds of assessments in music education. There's the placement - so you're number one, you're number two, you're number three, your competition, your audition, whatever that might be.

There's the summative - so here's where you are right now, that might be here, your final grade, your exam score, summing up a period of work. But then there is the diagnostic - okay, well here I'm gonna talk about your articulation, I'm gonna talk about your dynamic. I'm gonna talk about this and that, we're gonna look at bar 42, so able to actually break down the performance. And then the fourth, combined with that, the formative - here's how far you've come, here's where you were, here's where you are, have you gotten better, have you sort of regressed? And it's there in the second two that the expert musician really shines where that comes through.

We have a language to diagnose and to talk about and to give feedback, to give constructive feedback. But the problem is then, and you were saying this earlier, where often in these competitions all you get is the ranking. All you get is the number. We go through all this effort to bring these great performers together, and then we often dismiss the one of the greatest assets they bring with them is that feedback, that specific constructive diagnostic, formative feedback that they can bring.

So, once again, we come back to what are we trying to do here? If this is truly about helping boost people and help them get to the profession, shouldn't we be focusing on that sort of developmental feedback and that thing that we know that the training does enhance. And indeed those who are particularly skilled at teaching have honed that particular skill of giving someone feedback in a way that both is constructive, but also is motivating and will help them build.

Separate from the ability to somewhat consistently decide, yep, that's the best, that's the second best one, that's the third best one, particularly when there's that other wealth of research that finds that by tweaking a few factors, the order in which people play, what they wear, how attractive they are, their perceived gender, their race, there's a lot of research we can really get into the weeds on this, that you can actually change those orders by just tweaking a few of those extra variables in ways that are a bit worrying and we're all aware of, we're all aware of the blind audition and the reasons that exists.

We're all aware, I think, in the back for our minds that these issues exist. What I find fascinating by, in this research is it really brings it to the fore and it really does make us question how objective we can actually be in saying, yep, you're the competition winner. That was objectively the best performance today.

[00:39:17] Tricia PARK: That makes me think of a competition that I judged, a quartet competition of younger performers. There were four of us on the panel and this was a string quartet competition and it came down to two groups and they were really polar opposites of each other. One was extraordinarily, technically, precise and perfect and it was kind of amazing given their age especially. And then this other group that wasn't quite there at the technical level, but was just so impactful musically and expressively. And so then the panel was divided two and two, and they got written feedback from us, but we never had opportunity to meet with them and say, listen, just on this day with this particular group of people, this is the way it panned out.

But any other day it could have been different. And then it is really fascinating. I'm so glad you mentioned your research in that too, but that there are all these other components that we are unaware of how they influence who we choose at that particular moment.

Not to mention whether we have indigestion from a bad lunch or, you know what I mean? Like, that's what I mean by that I wish so much that competitors could understand. I wish for myself too, that I had known that it's not that I'm the worst and I should just give up, it's so subjective and it could, the chips could have fallen a different way in another time, in another place with other people in a different lunch and I think what you're saying is so valuable for people to be aware of.

[00:40:51] George WADDELL: It was a report I found, I think you sort of alluded it to it earlier, Noa, that really sort of got me thinking this area. It was in the early days of my PhD at the Royal College of Music. I was just thumbing through the shelves of our library, I discovered that there was one particular shelf that was devoted to just stuff about competitions.

And since I was researching evaluation and judgements, I thought, well, what's here? And mostly it was quite sort of dusty old books, just listing the winners of competitions over the years, but tucked between two of them was this very thin little blue paperback volume. It was called Music Competitions - A Report very dramatically.

It was published by the British branch of the European String Teachers Association (ESTA). It came out in 1984 and it's an extraordinary little document and I'm really excited because, in finding this, I was contacted by the ESTA after I'd tweeted about it and I'd learned that they'd actually lost record of this particular document.

So I sent them a scan and they've now, since in the last few months, republished it and it's now available for free online. So anyone can go and read this. And what had happened is back in the early eighties, they got together a group of very high levels of performers and people from the industry, teachers, educators, people from broadcasting, recording all these many different areas and assembled this working group to take a state of the union of competitions in Britain at the time and what's working, what isn't, how can we approve them, et cetera. And they produced this report and it's quite extraordinary cuz you read it and you get the sense that the more they talked about it, the more worried that they became. And I want to share a particular line from that relates to what you said, but maybe first I'll just to give a sense of it. I'll just read literally the last paragraph of it, the last sentence cuz it's quite extraordinary.

" Competitions are closely identified with some of the principle threats, in particular the star system and the exploitation of young musicians. And until such time as they fade from the scene, they are best confined to the outer reaches of the profession where their influence may be negligible." So, Essentially they were, I hope I'm not over-interpreting it, but essentially they were calling for the end of the music competition. And again, these were very sort of prominent performers, people who had served on juries. One of them even, I believe, had a competition named after them posthumously. And you can go through and even in the eighties before a lot of the research had been done, they talk about the detriments to health. They talk about exploitation as you heard. And one line in particular that resonates with what you just said.

Just scroll it back up to it here. The more advanced that performers become, the more senseless our attempts to make sweeping value judgements of their playing. And I think that really resonates cuz you can think about, again, those competitions, I think about those early days going to those so-called festivals that were actually competitions and those beginner kids, you've got 16 little kids playing Little Bear in the Woods or something like this.

Well, there you can make some objective decisions. Some of them get 90% of the notes correct. And some of them get 10% of the notes correct. Some of them make it to the end and some of them don't. You can sort of cobble together some objective definitions of what is a successful performance of Little Bear in the Woods or not.

And to a degree, you can sort of move up through the years even into undergraduate training and there's still some sort of objective, yeah, you sort of get the notes right and is that actually what the composer wrote? Et cetera. At some point, everyone's playing all the notes right. At some point, anything that we could hope to call objective is now met as a baseline for entry.

And as you say, it becomes entirely subjective. It's taste and it's interpretation. And these things change by region and by year and, and indeed, you know, the particular moods in the state of mind that people are in, never nevermind all those sort of dynamics of a panel and who's senior and who's junior and who's conforming to who's opinion and, and all of these things.

And at what point does it become meaningless? At what point could you, you know, if you've, took the same performances and were somehow magically able to repeat it the next day when everyone was feeling a bit different and how does you say different things for lunch, might you get a different result?

And perhaps that's the way it's supposed to be, because there is no such thing as the perfect Waldstein Sonata. If there were, we probably would've figured it out by now, and we could, okay, we did it. Let's all go home. But that's not how music works. So this idea that we can sort of objectively compare these things really starts to break down.

And again, fine, let's celebrate those different opinions and celebrate those in interpretations. But then to go and say, ah, yes, but this one is deserving of, of adulation, and this one is deserving of money and this one isn't. It's damaging not just for the musician, but also for the industry and other audiences because what do we complain about?

They mention in that paragraph I read the star system. Well, what is that? That's where our audiences focus so much of their collective attention and indeed money on a very select few of performers around the world. And again, I don't hold any grudge against those wonderful performers. They earn every penny as far as I'm concerned.

But why is it that our audiences will very happily pay all of this money and fly all this way to see a particular performer when actually probably not too far away from them, there probably are performers depending on where they are in the world, of course, that they could sit and enjoy just as much.

But we've trained our audiences to think, ah, yes, there is a best one and a second best one. That means something. That's some sort of reality that exists. We create these stars and then complain when our audiences give them all the attention. So it's, I I think it's a danger, well dangerous is a strong word, but it, it's a paradoxical thing that we're doing it and we're sort of, making it much more difficult to get to this point where a community can celebrate their local artists if we keep pushing this idea that there's such thing as the best oboist in the world and we should give all our attention there. When in fact that that just objectively isn't true. There are many ways to greatness. And we can celebrate all of them. And I just don't think that on the whole competitions are creating that sort of net value.

I would find myself leaning towards, the opinions of this particular working group when thinking, well, maybe we can rethink these things and we can take all of that money and effort and collective enthusiasm and point it to other ways to sort of build and, and celebrate our profession.

[00:47:11] Tricia PARK: To that point, it makes me think of anecdotally, a friend of mine told me, you know, he was studying with a very prominent performer, violin professor who had won a major competition as a younger person and that she had rather, sort of wistfully had said to him at one point in a lesson, I wish that I had some of those performance opportunities now, that I had when I was younger and a little maybe too young to really take full advantage or really show what I could do. And so, we're generally in a culture that is pretty youth obsessed of course, but that you see that in classical music, I'm wondering again, given that anecdote, but also the reality that, if you're fortunate enough to be able to have a music career, in classical music, that there's longevity there that's very possible if you, take care of yourself and there's an evolution that will be required, of you. But even despite that reality, there's relatively little support for mid-level or mid-life artists as the system is now. How do you think the classical music industry can better support these artists who are, they have a long road to go, but they're not 25 anymore, you know, and they're not the Yoda Grand Master 80 year old yet either.

They have all these decades to go to develop and evolve.

[00:48:32] George WADDELL: Yeah, it's a really, really good point. I think you're quite right that, that we do give a lot of attention to these transition points, the transition, into say a higher ed education study, the transition into a music school, and then the transition out of it, getting your foothold in the profession so that those sort of early career artists we, we give a lot of attention to.

So I think you're quite right. I can imagine indeed we see a lot of frustration at those sort of in the midpoints of their career where, they've aged out of those perhaps arbitrary age limits on certain competitions, on grant funding and all these kind of things.

Incidentally, it's something we see a lot in academia research as well, funding, particularly targeting early career researchers. And as soon as you pass that, so many years post PhD, all of a sudden there are fewer opportunities. So what do we do about it? Well, so, as it did in many ways, COVID, if, I can sort of bring that specter up, it did bring a lot of things to the foreground. And one of the things that happened in that, in the United Kingdom, was the government launched a particular set of research funding pots as it were for people to go and really understand very quickly what is this pandemic doing to our society, to our sort of various industries.

So we were selected as one of the groups in the center of performance science to look at the arts industry. What is Covid doing to our industry, to the people in it, and indeed what can we do about it and how do we rebuild afterwards? What we found, we conducted a number of surveys of artists.

And indeed this wasn't just music, but we looked across the creative and cultural sector, so musicians, dancers, theaters, so the performing arts, but also artists and authors and even in some cases chefs and anyone who produced things of that nature. And what we found perhaps wasn't surprising that people were hit hard, that they were hit hard in the wallet. Their mental health, their physical health, was hit by the isolation, by the lack of work, by the lack of opportunities for performance on the stage. What we also saw were people shifting to new practices, as we well know of moving online and finding digital ways to engage with their audiences.

But generally what we found is that Covid was really, again, as it did over and over, was exacerbating the problems that already existed. So the early career artists now really struggling, those in the mid-career, even fewer opportunities. The part-time and temporary contracts, the month to month or even week to week scrambling for work and for gigs, well, it just exacerbated how fragile the whole industry was.

And as we build back from that, as we come out of that, Looking both at, well, are our audiences moving back to the concert hall away from the technologies where they moved. So we did another survey looking at, where we asked members of the public, how do you engage with the arts and how did you during the pandemic, and do you see that changing afterwards?

And what we found is, well, yes, they did move to technologies. They consumed in fact more arts, they felt through these technologies, and that's what we might call the fine arts, but that's of course also more Netflix accounts and more books downloading these kind of things. And they said, well actually this works quite well for, for us.

We'll probably keep doing this. We'll engage with more arts through technology going forward. Then we also asked them, well, did you spend more or less money on them during the pandemic? So, well we spent less, you know, generally times were pretty tough. And then we ask them, well, after the pandemic, do you plan to go back to spending how much you were?

Or will it stay the same or will it be less again? And the general response was we're gonna probably spend even less after the pandemic. And this incidentally was before the cost of living crisis hit, globally really. So what do we see? We see people want to engage with more arts and they want to do it through technologies online, but they want to pay less.

And that sort of fits this narrative of people generally don't like paying for things online. I say as I believe, listeners to this are listening now to a free podcast. We're sort of used to our digital content coming to us for free, aren't we? And this poses a great challenge for us, a bit of an existential crisis in some ways.

But on the other hand, we've dealt with this before, the advent of recording and radio and streaming and these things come up. But the challenge is, is well now who pays the artist? Where is this money coming from? How do we support this industry? So coming outta this research, we were given the opportunity to present our findings and policy recommendations to the government, a department called the department for Digital Culture, Media and Sport.

It's since been renamed, but that's just the flurry of British politics that we don't need to get into. And we gave a series of recommendations. And the first one, the number one, we thought, well, let's swing for the fences with this, would be a guaranteed basic income for artists and for creatives.

So as long as you qualify, and qualify, there's big quotation marks around that. That would be a complicated process to figure out. But we've already figured things out of that nature. For example, during Covid, with the various furlough and support schemes, a guaranteed income, if you are a creative, recognizing the fact that just as roads and police officers, and at least in some countries, doctors are considered a public good and should be paid for by the government, well indeed, artists and creators provide this essential value to their communities and can be supported as such. And there are many trials of this around the world. I think there's several dozen of them in the US alone. I believe New York's been trialing something, possibly San Francisco, a few other cities, trials happening in Ireland, we're seeing it pop up around the world.

Governments, local governments, regional governments, national governments experimenting with this. So we're really pushing to see some version of this in Britain, that baseline support for anyone who works professionally as an artist so that they can pay their bills and so that they can hang on and obviously supplement that with all the other work that they do, but just allowing them that freedom to explore and create and to do those things that they need to do as artists.

I think that would be an absolute game changer. And particularly when you look at all the economic evidence of the value, not just to health and society, but the economic value of arts and culture within a society brings to the economy. I mean, I think it would pay for itself and the evidence would suggest that.

So that was, a top line recommendation. We also recommended things like more funding for arts in health research, so really understanding the value in music, in health settings so we can expand in that way. And we also looked carefully at, How do we make sure people get paid for their digital contents, these sort of issues around digital rights and who owns what and is the money going where it should be?

And again, what does this have to do with competitions? Well, it's all funneling this idea that we have this competitive industry where there's so few opportunities for so many people and we're all scrambling for it. And one solution is, well, maybe there's just too many artists. Well, do we really want to live a society where that is the decision where, oh, there's too many people creating amazing things and art for us all to enjoy.

I mean, I guess that's an option. I don't think I would vote for that version of a society. So then, well, how do we support that? Well, we create more opportunity. But then that goes back to that argument of, well, why do we need competitions? Well, we need to train people for the industry.

It's a competitive industry. So are competitions actually just the symptom of these wider problems in the industry? And sort of a reflection of that. And indeed, you know, one can turn on the TV and see, the various shows where, yeah, the spectacle of judgment of people getting on stage and famous people with the spotlights on them, casting judgment on them and giving them buzzers and awards and whatever it might be. It's almost become a parody of itself, this ultra competitive nature of the arts industry. So I don't blame competitions fully for that. I think they sort of reflect the nature of the industry, but I think they have their parts to play. And, you know, one can tackle both at the same time.

We can find ways to help the effort that goes into competitions to be, to create something a bit healthier for the industry, but also we can tackle those industry challenges directly.

[00:56:13] Noa KAGEYAMA: feels like about as encouraging a place to, end the chat as there could be. I'm glad that it, took that turn at the end and, are many steps yet to go, seems like there are things that can be done that would perhaps change how the culture of, classical music and music more broadly maybe feels to a lot of the folks within it, um, or are looking at it as a potential career.

So, you know, is there anything that we should have asked that we just didn't think to ask or didn't know to ask that is important to add to this discussion?

[00:56:43] George WADDELL: I suppose one question I've been asked before on this topic is if you are someone who is involved in a competition, particularly if it's one in a small community or somewhere where that it's maybe a bit more rural or where it is the one representation of the bringing together of, of young artists in your area.

What I wouldn't want you to take away is, oh, well, scrap it. Get rid of it. You're causing harm. I mean, no, I, i please hope that, that isn't the message taken away. I mean, to whoever you are listening, thank you for that work. It's the lifeblood of these communities. And I know from experience, coming from such a small community, what I would say is just look for every opportunity you know, they're often called festivals. Make it a festival, make it a celebration. After all these wonderful young musicians have played and everyone's clapped and celebrated. Just stop there, skip the bit where you even say you, you're the best one. Just don't do that part. Everything else, that's the value of it.

That's the celebration of it. So I just encourage anyone who is in involved in these things to just help make those little shifts. It'll make a world of difference for the longevity of the program, of the festival, of the arts culture in the area, but also for all those young musicians that really just, they just need celebrating and they need that platform.

So if, if I was to leave one message there would be for that, that I think there's all things that we can all be doing to make differences in our local areas to really celebrate that kind of music making.