A Balanced Competition
For the uninitiated, it can be difficult to understand why people love a cappella. Heck, even for those of us who do actively enjoy it, it can be difficult to put into words why we enjoy this art form so. While we’ll never have a truly comprehensive list of everything cool about a cappella, 200 Reasons to Love A Cappella is our best attempt at assembling a list of what makes it great.
Reason #183: A Balanced Competition
Often as not, when there’s an a cappella competition, we get caught up in questions of which group was better than another. It makes sense. We all have our favorites and our opinions, and whenever placement and awards are going out, competitors and the audiences are going to have its dissenters, and their urges to develop their own rankings.
As someone who has by attended well over fifty live competitions, I can say that one of the joys of a competition comes when we sit back and take a more objective look at a show, and see a true diversity of acts—those moments when rankings and comparisons begin to fail on the very grounds that we really are comparing apples and oranges in the form of all-male, all-female, and mixed groups; in groups that stick to a genre versus ones that pride themselves on mechanics; in groups that focus exclusively on the music versus ones that stage full-blown visual performances.
Indeed, one of my favorite brands of competitions are the ones when I can, at least temporarily, forget it’s a competition at all in favor of consuming a balanced and diverse slate of performances.
I love it!