Anglo Music Press
Well-Known Member
I really think publishing results in this way (multiple adjudicators) showing their independantly arrived at conclusions is very healthy and may help drive up the standard of adjudication. However it is disconcerting for well respected judges to arrive at such divergent results and does open the question of why do we enter in the first place, especially considering the adverse impact a "duff" result can have on a band.
I don't want to get dragged into a debate here, but would make the following points:-
This was my first experience of a system like this and I wasn't sure how well it would work. In the event, none of the bands gave a really commanding performance of this difficult piece, so the judges' job was to estimate how much the faults affected the plus pionts in each performance. This HAS to be a matter of opinion. No surprise that three people had three different opinions about this (the Mouthpiece sees many differences of opinion, after all!!) but the overall result was an aggregate of three valid opinions. I think that is much better than:-
a) one judge's opinion
b) a result agreed on by compromise, where one valid opinion has to, by definition, be subservient to another.
Of course, bands that got one high placing and two lower ones think that the high placing was right and the others wrong. But, of course, they were ALL right and the final placing a true average of three perfectly valid opinions.
There are judges who don't like the system and I don't personally see the value of putting names to the markings (apart from ghoulish post-contest debate). In Switzerland they use a similar system with five judges, marking anonimously, where the top and bottom marks for each band are ingored to iron out possible anomolies, and I think this is the perfect system. It is expensive, of course, but the best things always are.