Best Tips On How To Organize Local Choral Competition
Here are some of the best tips on how to organize local choral competition. Organizing a local choral competition is no easy task. Like every other competition, you will most probably have participants who might have more experience than you do.
A pretty common scenario for much local choral competition is when participants are displeased with the outcome of the event. Many things can cause your participants to turn sour and for your competition to collapse.
Here are a few tips for organizers doing choral competitions.
Have A Plan
Yes, it might be cliche, but cliches work. That is why people repeat doing it because they work. Know the ins and outs of your event. Many things are crucial for the success of organizing choral competitions.
Length of preparation
No matter how good you are, cramming things is not the right way to operate. Do not prepare when the event is already at hand. Give yourself enough time to deal with the needs of your competition.
Organizing choral competitions need long preparations. Choral competitions require many things, and all of these also require time. Renting a venue for your competition needs time.
Organizers have to send letters to venue owners, and the process may take days, weeks, or months to have an agreement for both parties.
Your contestants must also have time enough to practice for their pieces, unlike solo competitions where the contestant can have a week or two to prepare. Choral competitions take months and hundreds of hours to finish learning songs.
Many school-based competitions abruptly scheduled. Everyone is in a panic because there are only weeks into the preparation. A very unhealthy way of organizing stuff. It stresses everyone out. Contestants may not have enough rehearsal time, which may lead to no entry submissions.
Remember, time is of the essence, never rush things
Decent to hefty prizes
Like any other event, having a reasonable budget is one of the best tips on how to organize local choral competitions is of utmost importance. You need to have an excellent figure to give for your prizes. Choir contestants practice hundred of hours to perform for like 10 minutes during the competition.
As a gesture of respect for their efforts, you can start by raising the number of your prizes.
I have witnessed a choral competition where the grand prize was only 5,000 pesos (100 USD). It was sacrilegious! Imagine a group of 20 or more people sharing 5,000 pesos.
They rehearsed for weeks or months and spent on their costumes. The prize was not even enough for a proper meal. Avoid being an organizer who never values the effort. Start by giving good prizes.
Contestants would not want to waste their time for a competition that can’t even compensate for their efforts.
Venue and room acoustics
Organizing choral competitions require an excellent venue to house your event. It also requires a venue with proper room acoustics. I have seen many chorale competitions set in an open space inside the mall. Well, doing so actually can be useful for the mall’s business, but it requires an excellent sound system.
If you want to know more about room acoustics you can visit this link. You can save money from sound system rental if you have an excellent sounding room.
Try to use no microphones
Having an excellent sounding room is very good for choral competitions. You can do away with using microphones for the competition.
Using microphones poses many problems for your choral competition.
First, if the mixing engineer is not well trained to produce a good sound, then your choirs have problems during the performance.
Second, judges need to score on the mixing of the audio rather than the real vocal quality of the choir. It may not always be the case, but this is an excellent approach to making sure the credibility of your competition is intact.
Deciding to put your competition inside the open space of a mall, then obviously you need to use a good sound system for your contestants. The bottom line is, choral competitions are all about raw vocal quality, not how good the sound system is.
Judges should be more than capable
Another one of the best tips on how to organize local choral competition is getting outstanding judges.
For places where there are no music schools, good music teachers are hard to come by.
What happens usually is that organizers tend to hire the wrong people. Credibility, experience, and excellent portfolio matters!
- Don’t hire judges who don’t know a thing about choral competitions. Some competitions introduce, accountants, engineers, as judges. I have nothing against them except if they wrongfully judge the event. I know lots of conductors who are not music majors and still are very good at choral competitions.
- Get the best judges possible in your locality. Know someone who has recently won competitions or is actively involved in any choral activities. Checking the background of a person before having them judge your competition is essential. Recommendations must still undergo heavy scrutiny because it affects the credibility of your competition.
- Get judges who stand for their verdict. Even with the best judges on board, it is still possible to have unsatisfied participants. Good judges can stand their ground and even explain it directly to contestants why the judging results were so.
Hire high profile judges
Part of protecting your name as an organizer of your local choral competition is linking your event with well-known identities in the choir industry.
Yes, they are expensive, but the money you spend to hire them is worth it.
Participants have more respect for the event because of the roster of judges involved. The more you give value to your judging panel, the higher people think of your event.
Quality photo and Videos
Of course, you don’t want people to remember your event by memory alone.
Having good quality photos and videos can further advertise your event even after it culminated.
Sharing it online is beneficial for your event.
Participants would love to see pictures and videos they could share online.
Why Organizing Local Choral Competitions matter?
Being an organizer for your local choral competition is a sacred obligation. Events such as this educate the public. That is why you need to know the best tips on how to organize a local choral competition.
If you have a good competition, it teaches participants more about how they could improve their performances and musical education in the field of choral singing.
If you don’t mind the details of your event, it affects the learning process of the participants, especially for areas that do not have music schools.
Di you find these 8 best tips on how to organize local competition useful? Let me know by leaving a comment.