Numero Cinco

Technology, as great as it is becoming, should be a muted tool for musical assessment. Rhythmical ideas can be assessed without being heard. Choreographed danced moves can be assessed without being heard. Pitches issues can lead to discrepancies and discrepancies lead to inaccurate measures of assessment. Or disaster like this:
I was in a situation in my junior year where I was auditioning for a spot in the Pennsylvania Music Educator Association's Region IV Chorus. At the audition for District Chorus, I had placed 6th. The top 10 advance to Regionals, so I wasn't that worried. Until I got to the audition room. northeastern and central PA do things a little differently in the audition. You need to memorize pretty much have each of the 10 distributed pieces memorized; pitch for pitch, rhythm for rhythm, dynamic for dynamic, etc. Mind you, one has NO idea what song will be selected for the audition. All you know is that of the 10 pieces, you will be asked to sing your voice part on two of the songs. The first 5 students are recorded and at the end of the 8th or 10th student, the judges make sure that they are accurately grading/rating all of the student's performance. For this specific audition, I had the luxury of going 5th (they choose order of audition at random). As the last student being taped, I walked into the room confident in what I knew would be the pieces. I was correct with both of my guesses, so now I felt REALLY confident. The judges (1 male, 2 female) were not familiar to me. They have their backs toward you so that the judging is "objective". No teachers can obviously be on the same voice part in the judging area as the students. Once the pitch is given (yes, a choral audition is given a cappella without any hint of the other voices) (Vygotsky would have a field day...) the assigned teacher sings back the pitch. But what if the teacher has vocal issues? Do you take the teacher's pitch or the one from the pitch pipe? I motioned for the teacher to give the pitch once again. Each student is guided into the room by a not-so-helpful door person, who could be a teacher or a parent from the band or whomever seems responsible enough at the time. I immediately turned to my door person who just happened to be a music teacher and left the room. I begged her to have another teacher give me the pitch, even if it was at another octave because I could not decipher between the teacher's pitch and the pipe and which to take. My claim was overruled and I was told to just go with it. YOU DON'T TELL A FRUSTRATED KID TO JUST GO WITH IT WHEN YOU'VE BEEN PREPARING FOR 4 MONTHS (ROUGHLY 120 DAYS) FOR A STUPID AUDITION! Afterwards, I rallied around several other gentlemen from my voicepart, and before I even got to them, they informed ME that there was an issue with pitches. Apparently, this one teacher is a smoker. But luckily for the first 5 people, the auditions were taped. I begged my teacher to find out what was on the tape, but unfortunately, the head of District chorus (who also had members of his group nearly missing the cut to regional chorus) discarded the tapes and said that they were fine. No one will ever know how valuable those tapes could have been.
I just feel the ear can find discrepancies on its own without the help of an audio device. Taping does nothing to help the performer other than point out flaws and maybe even add to them. Or in my case, enable the listener to ignore the problem and cheat.
P.S. I placed 9th in the audition and made it to regionals. Yet, I placed 6th in the state auditions when combined with ten of the best kids from an opposing district. Stupid ass greedy teachers.