File: hornbyjim-oh-contests_M.mp3
Speakers:
JH – Jim Hornby
JH I can see that it's a fairly arbitrary result. Also, it's a small community and anybody's going to be a judge, they're not going to bring someone from Halifax to judge them. They're going to get some farmer who isn't going to play but who had some interest in the music and he's always going to be related to more on one side to X than Y, and he's going to know, work with somebody and not work with someone else, and there's going to be all these other factors that you get in a small society at play. So if somebody has an overall better performance but hits one bad note, does that make someone else better? Or has a professional way of finishing rather than just kind of dying out at the end, or starting. There's different kind of qualities that might be irrelevant in a dance context which, if you're on a stage, focuses on whether you start very precisely together with your accompanist and all this sort of thing. But with a dance you just kind of get warmed up and then, it might be more important how loudly you play or the kind of rhythm or spirit you play with or even how long you can just physically carry on playing a medley of tunes that suit the dancers. So, you know, it's a different context than what would please a group of dancers. The whole dance context has pretty well gone out of fiddling. I can remember going to old time dances when I was younger. It's certainly a very different situation than getting up on a stage at a community concert or whatever; there's different virtues that come into play.
