In amongst the rest of what locals in my part of the world call "squit" there is one potentially valid point
Any other form of arbiter is subjected to quality control. Football referees, tennis umpires, judges - they are all monitored on an ad-Hoc basis to ensure that they are coming up with the correct decisions. Any repeated errors are dealt with through training or removal from approved lists.
Who, however adjudicates our adjudicators? An easy method would be to have a 3rd person sitting in the tent - so they get the same perspective - who can then ask the judges to justify why they've gone with a result if its potentially contentious.
Adjudicators would still have the ability to do their job, and providing they could justify it then the checker will "go with it". However it may possibly stamp out supposed favouritism.
The downsides are costs - who bears that? And also numbers. For example in a couple of weeks time there are 4 area contests going on simultaneously. Who will judge the judges?
How independent will they truly be?
Never in my life have I replied to one of these but I must say, to whomever you are - how can you be so sure of the results and 'corruption' (if you are a member of Wingates band) as you didn't hear either Leyland or Fairies.
It is a sad world at times when people take pleasure in trying to create bother from behind their computers.
Well played to everybody at the regionals yesterday and best of luck to all who have their contests in the coming weeks.
Adam Taylor (trombone, Wingates Band, dancing in the changing room for both Leyland and Fairies performances pre and post our contribution).
If Whitewitch is who I think she is, your assumptions as to her status as an adjudicator or conductor are erroneous.So - WhiteWitch presumably from your comment, you're an adjudicator for one of the other top section areas or an MD in the top section? And you were sitting in direct line with the adjudicators?
If not then how do you know Foden's error count was higher? I appreciate that people often buy study scores to follow at contests, but adjudicators and MDs have put in months of study.
Obviously if you do fall in to the stated group and you've been studying the score for months then fair enough
As for the media, more often or not 4BR and others get their predictions totally wrong. Especially in the lower sections. That's probably because they are sitting in a different area of the hall and hear things differently - and haven't been studying the score for months either
Was there a Bar at this Venue?Well no that's possibly the most simplistic interpretation of my post that you could have chosen to go with. Things are a lot more subtle. And I suspect that you probably have to intelligence to recognise that but wanted to make my post look as ridiculous as possible so you posted a ridiculous reply. Everyone seems to be very well connected and decisions have been made in the past (not just contesting I'm talking about in the wider banding infrastructure) by people with a personal interest in the situation or who are bosom buddies with those who the decisions affect and surprise surprise they have been made in a corrupt way.
Were back to the Bar again.I want to hear more about the magical utopia with rainbows and smiles. I think Seff might be on to something
If Whitewitch is who I think she is, your assumptions as to her status as an adjudicator or conductor are erroneous.
I don't mean this to be confrontational but I'm not actually sure your examples are relevant - football referee's, tennis umpires and judges (I presume you mean this in a legal context?) all have quite strict rules/laws and frameworks by which to judge.
Our adjudicators judge on a much more subjective level, given that they're almost making their own rules as they go along (what they're especially looking out for, how tight to tempo they wish bands to be, how much they prioritise intonation, tightness, etc) - if there are disagreements with your examples on the basis of their interpretations of rules, it's because we actually have access to the rules they're supposed to be judging to.... in the case of adjudications, we don't have this... so we could be judging their judgements by entirely different sets of criteria - then wondering why we're coming to different results - THAT's banding for you, lots of different opinions from different perspectives.
The adjudicators make their decisions and so have to be 100% certain. This suggestion may cause problems as you may need adjudicators to monitor the adjudication monitors!!!!!To be fair, I don’t think she’s an adjudicator either. Sarcasm very difficult to do on here.
They are. But having been a (not very good) football referee, I can also tell you that there is a lot of subjective stuff that you’re judged on as well – positioning, speed of reaction, effectiveness of working with other officials (linesmen), and even whether something should have been a yellow or red card. Stuff that you can’t write into a rule book and isn’t necessarily black and white. And I know you’re not being confrontational J
To a certain extent. Most of the criteria can be found on the AoBBA website and it’s quite prescriptive – tuning, balance, tempo’s are all fairly “OK” or “Not OK”. There is a lot of subjective stuff though, and I appreciate that it is down to opinion – especially where “basics” are usually a given (although quite a few “top section” bands struggle with these sometimes!)
The way I view it, perhaps at area contests and one or two key contests is that a separate (non-binding) adjudication can run alongside. This would never be published but purely used for adjudicator monitoring. Where there is a big discrepancy, then the contest adjudicators can be asked why they ordered the bands as x – if they can justify the result then again fine, but where perhaps they have made a mistake then the judges in question can perhaps undergo more training or monitoring. Similar systems could be used to train and monitor new adjudicators going forward.
The result will never be overturned – because the contest adjudicators word is final – but perhaps it will encourage them to ensure that theyre 100% happy with the result. At the end of the day, area contests are important because qualification, promotion and relegation is at stake – whilst I am not suggesting that anyone is “crooked” perhaps we need a countercheck running to make sure that any problems such as the Wrexham episode don’t ever happen again.
Ifail so see the relevance of the last comment.There was flashing lights and everything - the whole shabang. It was delightful.
The system is not void of quality control as it stands. Contest organisers see rogue results, and, if they want to reduce controversy, don't book the adjudicators that produce them. Geoffrey Brand's long and distinguished adjudicatorial career hit an abrupt buffer after the 3-judge discrepancy of the 1998 Masters. Goff Richards didn't take quite such a dent after he placed Dyke 13th at the Yorkshire Area in 2003, but the most high profile stuff thinned out from there on.
These two masters are no longer adjudicating (or, in the latter case, on this astral plane), so citing their two high profile surprises as examples does not feel too harsh. One could pick out currently practising adjudicators that generate audience puzzlement with their results more often than the average, but in the interests of friendliness and tact I'll refrain - it wouldn't add anything to the debate to do so anyhow.
You are arguing for a more rigorous system, one where an explicit review is made of decisions. I think you'd need to at a minimum record each performance of each reviewed contest for later perusal. Certainly one could achieve greater regularity of results by a consistently manned committee appraising them afterwards, and feeding back to judges where and how their judgements were felt to be reasonable. Being a brass band adjudicator is already a stressful, underappreciated, and underpaid job, though - how much critical feedback will judges take before they decide that 'the love of it' is reduced to a point beyond the threshold of enjoyment?
But I think there is quite a fundamental problem with the idea of formalising a busy and potentially expensive review panel - diminishing returns. You might not like "That's banding" as a retort to a result that you find strange, but it is a very to-the-point way of noting that the basic subjectivity of what's being done makes an objective decision in the final analysis not possible.
So you take some already overloaded people and task them with reanalysing a contest's worth of musical data each time someone complains (which, given how band contesting tends to be, would likely be every time a contest section was run). They go through it all again, and declare either basic happiness (in which case the grumbling won't stop) or basic unhappiness (in which case they can feed back to the judge in question, and they can together consider how the judge's methodology might or might not be reasonable). At the end, what have you gained? A very minor increment in overall consistency in the art of band contest adjudication.
But do we even want this? And if we do, are we wise to? What's the ideal? A machine that counts splits and hears bad tuning and ensemble precision? Banding's pursuit of technical perfection is very often undertaken at the expense of musical interestingness, and formalising contesting further only feeds that beast. While I understand totally where you are coming from - if we are going to contest, let us do it as sensibly as we can - I do not think that caring harder about contesting is something that is going to make banding at this point in time more worthwhile.
Further to the above, may I venture that a conductor' interpretation may be subjective but an adjudicator should be objectiveThe adjudicators make their decisions and so have to be 100% certain. This suggestion may cause problems as you may need adjudicators to monitor the adjudication monitors!!!!!
Further to the above, may I venture that a conductor' interpretation may be subjective but an adjudicator should be objective
Whitewitch's opinion is as valid as anyone else's. However it is banding and for most of us, it is only a hobby!!The thing is that your opinion doesn't actually matter. The adjudicators came up with a different result. Thats just banding for you.
If you are so bothered, what are you going to do about it?
What say you Whitewitch?I'll have you know that Whitewitch has been the compère for many an area preview
If you are referring to this thread, only 2 posts have been deleted - and they were deleted by the people who posted them.Just curious about how many posts have been deleted to protect the famous (oops I meant innocent) ?