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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Brian asked:</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>
<DIV>> You make a decent point, however, wouldn't a storyteller</DIV>
<DIV>> benefit from learning rhythm by doing poetry? Couldn't
that</DIV>
<DIV>> help them learn pacing and word stress better? </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Of course, but that has nothing to do with the question being asked, which
was about competitions.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>It will help a story-teller to learn poetry. It will help a poet to
learn song. It will help a singer to learn story-telling. It will
help a writer of war stories to armor up and fight in a couple of wars. It
will help a writer of love songs to fall hopelessly in love with somebody who's
married. It will help any bard to be a herald, or to hold court as
baron/ess or king/queen. It will help a singer to do 50 sit-ups each
day.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>It does not follow that the competition should require more than one style,
or a melee, or infidelity, or holding court, or sit-ups.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Many years of watching competitions in that format convinces me that
requiring a poem does not force people to learn meter, requiring a song does not
teach them to stay on key, and requiring a story does not teach them about
pacing. I've had to sit through way too many off-key songs, rambling
stories, or droning poems from people who could have been entertaining me
(and demonstrating their diverse skills) if they had been allowed to.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>> Remember, poem and story are classified as two
different</DIV>
<DIV>> styles, so it would not be necessary for someone who is</DIV>
<DIV>> tone deaf to sing. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Of course. But people who don't enjoy memorization usually do poorly
at both song and poetry. And great singers will entertain better, and
often show greater range of abilities, with three great songs than with a
great song, average poem, and average story.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Remember, I started my post by saying that I don't care how people set up
their competition. Indeed, I think the competitors *shouldn't* have a say
in it. My main point was that the three-style trichotomy, as a tool to
promote diversity, is inferior to many other tools for that purpose, and often
leads to lesser performances, as bards are forced away from showing us their
best.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>As baron, I ran one Steppes Eisteddfod by calling for two pieces:
</DIV>
<DIV>1. Peform your best piece, no matter how often we've heard it, </DIV>
<DIV>2. As you enter the competition, you will be randomly assigned the
name of somebody important to the history of the barony. Three hours
later, you must do a piece praising this person. (Somebody asked me if I
would let somebody draw again, if they got somebody they *really* didn't like,
or somebody they knew nothing about. I responded, "No -- if I could
arrange it, everybody would be put in that position.")</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>I think we got a great deal of variation from that, far more than requiring
separate styles would have done. The bards had to stretch themselves in a
way that was specific to the Steppes competition.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Brian, our biggest disagreement is that you are looking for the best
form of competition, and specifically for the kind of competition that provides
the most variation in a single competition.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>By contrast, I am far more interested in variety over the course of a year
than a single night, and I believe that many different competitions in many
different formats is better than any single answer. For my first several
years, all competitions were "Do two or three pieces without repeating a
style." For me, this meant a sonnet, a generic myth, and maybe a drinking
song -- every time for several years. While that meant a minor amount of
variety from me each night, it *encouraged* repetition over the course of a
year, especially in the styles in which I had few pieces. It absolutely
failed to break me out of my beginner's rut.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Also, any format plays to some people's strengths, and other people's
weaknesses. If we had a single format, then we are permanently favoring
some people, and discriminating against others. But as we use different
competition formats, different people get opportunities that play to their
strengths. Also, and just as important, it gives the people whose strength
is multiple styles the opportunity to enter competitions in which they do *not*
have an advantage. We all deserve the opportunity to compete when
the odds are against us. (Winning such a competition, while rare, is sweet
indeed.) In a fighting tournament, I am sometimes drawn against a
newbie, and sometimes drawn against Miguel. I don't want either to happen
all the time.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>One of the reasons I don't think the competitors should have a direct say
in how the competition runs is that I know exactly what kind of competition is
best for me personally. To improve my odds of winning, it would have an
odd number of elimination rounds, and you could not use the same style twice in
a row. You would need to do at least one original piece, one documented
period piece, and one extemporaneous piece. That format exposes the
weaknesses of the largest number of great bards, while avoiding my own, and lets
the majority of my pieces be poems, including the final one. But I would
argue just as strongly against this being the standard format as I do against
any other.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>I never want to see the format of "use all three styles" or "use two of the
styles" go away. The people whose strengths are in multiple performing
styles would be unfairly lessened. But we should not *always* hold
competions that discriminate against the people whose strength is a power
singing voice, or research into the folklore of many cultures, or deep knowledge
of Ansteorra's history, or even the bards who stick to their own persona and
only perform as a bard in a single culture did.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Robin of Gilwell / Jay Rudin</DIV></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>