MISCELLANEOUS JUDGING NOTES

I found it strange to sometimes give higher marks for the composition but lower marks for relevance and vice versa, but I suppose that is inevitable. In general all the competitors have a good grasp of harmony but show little daring and the overall experience was that it was a trifle dull, nobody made me sit up and listen, some came close. Many of the rhythmic patterns used were very common in the pop world and carried little punch. Sometimes an audience needs to be given a good shaking and particularly with this picture which was full of incident and red hot flames it was the ideal opportunity and alas no-one took that opportunity. Listen to the orchestral music of Messiaen, listen to Bruckner, how he can use silence to create an effect. Generally dynamics were of varied effectiveness, there should have been more extremes…it hurts when you burn yourself!

General Comments

When I was a lot younger whenever we had exams at school we were told that there were three very important things to remember to do before we started …all 3 turned out to be the same … READ THE QUESTION…

You can guess that I don’t think too many of the entrants had done that, by which I mean looked at the picture and put that picture into sound, be actually inspired by the picture. It seemed to me that too many looked at the events before and after the event and totally ignored the fire in the picture itself. The two deer in the picture assumed an importance totally out of relation to their size in the picture, they are certainly part of the picture but to me they should not dominate the music

As I listened to the pieces without reading the notes I heard two or three that seemed to express the fear, the danger, the thrill of fire. The others expressed nothing at all related to the picture that I was looking at. The notes on the compositions only made things worse and I almost thought that they were written after the music had been finished. Better to say nothing and let the music speak for you otherwise you end up with compositions like Ketelbey’s Persian Market and other pieces in that genre that tell a story like a scenario for a film score. Because few of the entrants had supplied scores of their entries I decided not to consult the scores of those that did so that my judgement would be fair to all by only listening to the mp3 file.