I have yet to experience a choral adjudication as embarrassing as the one I witnessed yesterday at the RCZ Rangano huru Kuwadzana choral competitions in Westley Harare. Here are some of the adjudicator Dennis Kapiyas comments, which he emphatically demonstrated in an unequivocal way. Please take this, as an academic debate. It is only my opinion: 1) /rit./ conductors should have interpreted rit as ritenuto, not as ritardando. Indeed, the choir that came 1st did exactly what Kapiya wanted done, despite that in all cases where /rit./ appeared, it was applied with permanence to a whole phrase, not temporarily to one note as per music dictionaries. 2) Conductors were not expected to conduct beats but, to conduct the choir. I did not understand this statement in the context of a song that had a metric modulation from 4/4 to 3/4. If conducting is not going to emphasize meter, how then would the choir show the difference between the two passages in terms of metric character? In his explanation and demonstration Kapiya went on to say that no conducting should have upbeat strokes, emphasizing that all beats should be downbeats, no difference between beat no 1 and the rest of the beats. This is exactly how it was done by the choir that came 1st, where, instead of emphasizing the 1st beat in 3/4, they accentuated all the beats. Kapiyas demonstration literally shredded all pages that contain conducting diagrams in the books on Choral Music. 3) Lowering the left hand during conducting is a sign that the conductor has literally thrown in the towel, surrendered. He categorically stated that he heavily penalized conductors for that. 4)In giving key, Conductors are not allowed to play more than the key note of the song on the pitched instrument. He demonstrated that the conductor should neither play the opening chord nor the first 3 or 4 notes of the melody. Surprise, surprise. He condemns this as coaching. I believe coaching does not end in the rehearsal room. It stretches to the end of the performance. This is just my opinion, lets debate on this.
Posted on: Sun, 13 Jul 2014 01:18:39 +0000
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