This week the first adjudicators for the 2012 World Choir Games have been announced (see here). Christopher Eanes, conductor of Cincinnati Boychoir, served as a judge for this year’s World Choir Championships for Youth and Young Adults in Graz, Austria. Now he tells us about his experiences and how to prepare best for the competitions in Cincinnati. By the way, in July 2012 Eanes will compete with his choir at the 7th World Choir Games, too.
“In July of this year, I was honored to serve as a judge for INTERKULTUR’s World Choir Championships for Youth and Young Adults in Graz, Austria. What an experience! For a week, I enjoyed the privilege of adjudicating many outstanding choirs, and am now looking forward to putting together my own choir’s program for next summer’s World Choir Games in Cincinnati.
When going into a competition, it is easy to find oneself overly concerned with trying to predict what the judges will be listening for. My advice to choir directors preparing for the World Choir Games? Don’t bother! Choose music that your choir can sing well, regardless of difficulty, and, most important, choose music that they love to sing.
In Graz, each of the judges that I worked with came from a different educational background, a different part of the world, and a different singing tradition, so naturally we each had different priorities when actively listening to a choir. This is what makes INTERKULTUR events so thrilling and so rewarding: you have the opportunity to truly ‘show off’ what makes your choir, or your choral heritage, so unique.
Of course, it is also for this reason that wonderful things happen in the adjudication room after each competition. Put any eight judges in a room together and you will hear eight different opinions on diction, style, and performance practice. However, according to the
MUSICA MUNDI system of adjudication that INTERKULTUR employs, there are strict guidelines about what constitutes a gold, silver, or bronze medal performance, and judges are trained carefully to ensure that scoring is consistent.
The best part of this, however, is that as a conductor you get to see how each judge scored your performance; this means you get to see how you scored on technique, interpretation, and overall artistic impression, and should you want to discuss your performance with any of the judges, you are provided an opportunity to do so. At the end of the day, though, the overarching question asked by the INTERKULTUR directors is always: “How can we best reward all of the choirs we heard today for their artistic achievement?”
While I know that the comments and scores we (the judges) provided to the competing choirs were valuable, they were not nearly as meaningful as the choirs’ interactions with each other. Truly, the choirs that got the most out of the experience were the ones that came with a desire to share their music and their heritage; for these choirs, ‘winning’ was less important than simply wanting to express their joy through music. The irony, of course, is that so often it is these choirs that end up being top performers in the competition itself. There is a close link between pure sound and joy of expression, and this is the link that INTERKULTUR judges are encouraged to find, and in the end, to reward.
While we can all become swept up by the thrill of competition, INTERKULTUR never loses sight of the most important aspect of what it is we are doing: sharing our heritage and our artistry with each other in order to draw the world closer together. As we prepare for the World Choir Games and I return to the other side of the judging table, I look forward to sharing what the Cincinnati Boychoir does well, and I hope that we are able to make a musical impact and serve as good hosts to the many choirs that will visit our wonderful city next summer!"
Christopher Eanes
Artistic Director
Cincinnati Boychoir
