Over on Stephen Aron Guitar Studio blog he writes a great article regarding competitions in music. Stephen is fantastic guitarist and teacher over at Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Here is the intro but read on at his site:
It is perfectly obvious that there is no place in the world of classical music for performance competition. Competition is well-suited for athletics, in which it is measurable whether a goal was or wasn’t made, if one racer touches the finish line before another, etc. It is well-suited to spelling bees or mathematics, in which answers are quite simply right or wrong. But how can this paradigm be applied to the performance of classical music? What we do is so fundamentally subjective that it seems our world would be an inhospitable place for competitive culture to thrive.
But no, instead we find competitions in music to be alive and well, to be thriving in fact. This seems at first glance strange, but there are many reasons for it.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE via stephenaronstudio.blogspot.ca/2014/09/guitar-competitions
