A cappella group performing on stage
The A Cappella Blog

Who should get to be judges?

Measure for Measure

We welcome you to weigh in on the topic at hand by posting a comment.

We also welcome readers to offer up their own statements for our writers to consider, Measure for Measure.

This week's topic: If you’re going to be a judge, you should have experience with what you are judging. It is important for ICCA adjudicators to have prior experience performing in collegiate a cappella before they work a competition.

True: The A Cappella Blog prides itself on making collegiate a cappella accessible to a mainstream audience, not lingering on musical or adjudicating technicalities, but rather on what everyday people can observe and enjoy in an a cappella show. With that being said, our core staff members have not handed in applications to be ICCA judges. We were not a cappella performers. When it comes to actually judging a competition, we will openly acknowledge and embrace that that work is best left to the experts—those who have done it themselves. Without such experience, a judge may have musical expertise, or an eye for good performance, but he or she will never be able to see the bigger, holistic picture, and that’s what competitions should be about.

False: No judges are perfect. Some aren’t quite as qualified musically as their peers. Some aren’t quite so qualified to judge visual presentation. There are some who spectators will perceive to have biases, because they’re from the same state, city, or even home institution as a competing group. That's not even touching upon the potential bias (perceived or real) that a past performer brings to the table--bias against a rival school, bias against a specific type of group, an unconscious bias against groups that try to do the same songs their groups once mastered.

In an ideal world, the judges would have all of the pieces of judging, including experience, well in hand. They would be ready, available and eager to travel across the country to judge competitions in which they couldn’t possibly have a stake. In the real world, these factors will never all align—or, at the very least, not on a consistent basis. The ICCA production staff does a remarkable job, as is, of just finding people with the musical qualifications to accurately judge a show. Adding prior collegiate a cappella performance experience to the screening process would likely make it impossibly hard to staff every show. Taking this all into account, it’s not realistic, reasonable, or necessarily even ideal for judges to all be collegiate a cappella alumi.

© 2007 - 2021, The A Cappella Blog. All rights reserved. Terms