The Long View | Taking Nationality Out of Competitions

Earlier this month I was in Odense, Denmark, presenting and commentating on the live broadcast of the Carl Nielsen International Competition’s flute category.

A few weeks before the competition got going, an email from the organizers appeared in my inbox. Some tough decisions were being grappled with back at HQ concerning the Russian musicians pre-selected by the juries. The organisers were canvassing opinion.

I replied in no uncertain terms: this is not the Olympic Games. Musicians compete as individuals, not representatives of a country. Anyone not set on revealing support for illegal wars or crimes of aggression should be welcomed.

A week or so later, another email. This one was addressed directly to us, the presenters. We were requested not to ‘nationalize’ any of the contestants appearing. I interpreted that as an instruction to avoid dwelling on nationality – to steer clear of using it as a trusty old cliché through which to view issues of training, interpretation, work ethic and temperament. So, just about manageable.

But no, this was even more: we weren’t to mention nationality at all. Nothing. Nada.

This struck me as completely unworkable: ‘please welcome to the stage, 19-year-old Jean-Michel Françoise from…well, from the greenroom.’ Besides, the only Russian-resident musicians had been prevented from attending the competition anyway due to travel and visa complications. Where could any controversy come from?

In the end, my co-host and I found a workable solution, whereby we would append the most recent (or current) place of education to contestants when welcoming them to the stage: ‘…a graduate of the Colburn School of Music,’ and so on.

Sometimes the candidate was studying on home turf. On the overwhelming majority of occasions, they were not – a reminder that many musicians are citizens of the world more than of a single country, and that advanced musical training increasingly knows no borders.

I’ve done a few of these competitions before, commentating intensely on a candidate’s progress through the rounds while deploying standard John Motson-derived titbits such as ‘now the German really has his work cut out!’

To a point, it’s crude. To another point, it’s also tremendously useful in sustaining an atmosphere and establishing the air of sports-style competitive intrigue on which live broadcasts of music competitions thrive. It’s also of huge benefit to the disorientated viewer in need of quick identifiers, backstories and even potted interpretative histories. As commentators, we have to think of the viewer first and foremost and for impartial viewers watching from home, it can be useful to attach competitors to countries.

In Odense, I soon started to find the non-nationality policy rather liberating. Did it lead us away from nationalistic stereotypes, beyond those very Danish Carl Nielsen-shaped ones that came to define the event the nearer the contestants got to playing a Nielsen concerto in the final? Probably. It certainly prompted us to study the musicians’ CVs more deeply and appreciate the long journeys they’d been on over the course of their education and early years in the profession.

Have we dwelt too much on nationality in competitions past? Perhaps, though I remain firmly of the opinion that many national stereotypes are rooted in a kernel of truth that journalists have a responsibility to examine, probe and stress test. I also suspect, this time round, that I saw the actual musicians in Odense more than I saw their nationalities. That surely benefitted them as performers as much as it did us as commentators, when fulfilling our responsibility for impartially analysing musical performances.

I’m also sure it helped my colleagues presenting the violin finals keep a clear head. The only recourse to nationality came, in fact, from one of the winners, who referred to ‘this difficult time for my country’ as he accepted joint first place (he came, of course, from Ukraine). If nothing else, it left us in no doubt that the focus this time was music and not politics. For ten days, it was just what everybody needed.