MUSIC 23241
January 19, 2011
Ohio's First Band Contest
In this particular article, Bianco describes what happened at the first Ohio Band Concert. OMEA organized the event on June 6th, 1924, at the Hays Hotel in Fostoria, Ohio. The Fostoria High School Boys Band participated in the schools Band Contest of America in Chicago the year before and was declared the winner. The entire city of Fostoria was excited to host the contest. Eight other bands participated in the contest from various schools in Ohio. Only 15 out of 600 band members were female. The solo event had five different categories, cornet, trombone-baritone, other brasses, reeds, other woodwinds. The bands could only have two soloists for each category. The judges assigned by the Committee on Instrumental Affairs were Taylor Branson, Jay W. Fay, and H.S. Warren. The judges were separated and placed behind a screen so they couldn't see the band playing. Bands were scored on a point scale for intonation, precision, interpretation, and tone quality with a maximum of 25 each for the categories. The Fostoria High School Boys Band won, Cleveland West Technical High School Band followed in second place, and Akron West High School got third place.
Although I don't have any personal experience with the band adjudicated events that went on in my high school, because I was in choir, I did help host a contest at our high school my junior year. It was a very exciting experience for me to see behind the scenes of a District V Contest. Obviously a lot has changed since 1924, so there were a lot of differences in the amount of schools present and the make up of the students in the groups. There were also more categories for the bands to choirs as far as musical choices and types of bands and choirs they wanted to take to contest.
While reading the description of how they ran the contests I was very intrigued by the scoring, judges, and casualness. In the article Bianco mentions that the schools also competed for honors such as Best Marching Band, Best Appearing Band, Best Appearing Drum Major, and Best Looking Bass Drummer, which was determined by three Fostoria High School females. This put the schools all in a good mood and it would be rather exciting to be part of the parade. The scoring system was interesting as well just because I am used to a one-to-five system presented now, but I do think giving you more numbers to choose from makes it more precise and the judges can be more detailed. The judges not being able to see the choirs also made it really interesting. Personally, as a performer, I always felt more nervous when I could see the judge, but at the same time I thought it improved our performance because we could see the person judging us. Overall, the article was very fascinating and fun to read.
Bianco, Robert S. (1974). Ohio's first band concert. TRIAD. 16-17, 28.
Excellent comments.
ReplyDeleteMLN