I started competing in Irish music competitions when I was 11 years old. I participated in a series of local competitions and, by the time I was 12, I had qualified to compete at a national competition in Saint Louis, Missouri. My mom and I flew down for the week. I remember being so nervous. I practiced more than I ever had in my entire life. I worked on the trills and rolls until my fingers bled. I couldn’t sleep at night in anticipation of my performance. When my competition day finally arrived, I was ready.
When the judge called my name I stepped forward. “I will be playing two jigs for you today. Donnybrook Fair and the Frost is all Over,” I nervously uttered into the microphone. I lifted my violin to my shoulder, and played my jigs to perfection. I hit every note, I maintained a perfect rhythm, and I ornamented the tunes perfectly. I played my final note with a big smile on my face. I confidently bowed and marched off the stage. As I listened to the rest of the kids perform, I was certain that I had placed. “Maybe I even won!” I thought to myself. When the round finished, the judge moved from the judging table up to the microphone. He began announcing the top finishers. “Third place …” not me. “Second place…” not me. I knew I had done it, I knew I had played the best set of tunes of all the competitors! My teacher knew it too, she held my hand really tightly! “First place…” not me.
My smile immediately reversed itself. I felt terrible. My teacher looked shocked, and several strangers around me said “You played really well, I thought you should have at least placed!” Even one of the moms of a girl who did win expressed her surprise. When I received my judging card, I was even more disappointed. The judge wrote, “The tunes were misrepresented. The ornamentation highlighted all of the wrong aspects of the tune, and the bowings were completely off. The second tune was barely recognizable.” I was so confused. I performed my trills and rolls exactly how my teacher had taught me, and I replicated his bow movements identically. According to my teacher, I played the tunes perfectly, but according to the judge, the performance was a mess.
This Tuesday’s lecture on the biological systems that process music brought back memories from this competition, and not only because I played a few Irish tunes. It confounds me that we all have dendrites, and axons and essentially physically identical body parts. Stimulants, like music, are transformed into electrical signals that, when strong enough, stimulate the axons. At a cellular level, everybody’s body, (for the most part) goes through this exact process. Sound waves proceed to the tympanic membrane, ear ossicles vibrate, and the sound waves are transferred to the cochlea, where the tectorial membrane then processes the noise (through the moving of the hair cells). Yet somehow the integrated response that the stimulus of music produces is different for almost every person. This different response is highlighted in the environment of a music competition. Judges are required to immediately quantify their personal artistic experience. This raises interesting questions about reducing art to numbers, but it also exemplifies the difference between people’s perceptions of musical performances relative to one another. My teacher thought that my performance during the competition was spectacular. However the judge heard the exact same performance, and hated it. Clearly neurological predispositions determine if somebody enjoys music, or doesn’t enjoy music. These dispositions make it impossible to create a “perfect” song, and they make it impossible to please everybody with one song. While I have accepted this limitation of music at this point in my playing career, this was a difficult pill to swallow as a twelve year old that practiced the “wrong” tunes until her fingers bled.