KLEE Discussion

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Magister Ludi
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KLEE Discussion

Post by Magister Ludi »

Please post your thoughts about the KLEE set in this thread. I'm especially interested to hear what people thought of the less mainstream portions of the distribution.
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Re: KLEE Discussion

Post by Cheynem »

I'm not a good fine arts player, but it was an enjoyable set to play, even though my body completely shut down for like the last two rounds.

The film questions were mostly good. The Third Man question got too easy way too fast (the ferris wheel scene that early?). Writing a question on Brazil is a good idea--while the lead-in was almost unforgettable if you've seen the film, I suppose that's a good thing. I really enjoyed the La Strada tossup, which is a film that needs to come up more, even though I stupidly negged it with Rossellini's Stromboli. Also, I was stunned to see the film Where is the Friend's House? asked about, as I saw that film and enjoyed it...yet I couldn't remember the director's name.

I really didn't enjoy the Renaissance building questions, but that could just be me. Opera questions were entertaining. Some common link ideas didn't turn out that well (if I remember right, there was on one _speaking_).
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Re: KLEE Discussion

Post by magin »

I enjoyed this tournament quite a bit; the questions were, on the whole, very well written, and I enjoyed hearing questions on important artists such as Claude and Anselm Kiefer that don't seem to come up much in quizbowl. I also liked the many solid musical clues for tossups such as Chopin's etudes and the symphonies of Shostakovich, to take two examples.

I think the one thing this tournament suffered from was excessive tossup length (and perhaps using a few too many criticism clues at the beginning of painting tossups). I wrote many very long tossups for Gaddis 2 on the belief that I needed that space to distinguish fine gradations in knowledge, but I've come to believe that for hard tournaments, tightly edited 7-8 line tossups are preferable to 10-12 line tossups because they provide a smoother pyramid. In my experience, 10-12 line tossups tend to have more leadin-type clues than good middle clues, which I don't think is either beneficial or really necessary to distinguish actual levels of knowledge.

In any case, most of the clues were interesting and non-vague, and I'd recommend that people writing arts questions strive to emulate the clue density and kinds of clues found in this tournament's questions.
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Re: KLEE Discussion

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

I was down.
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Re: KLEE Discussion

Post by theMoMA »

Some of the questions from this tournament seemed really, really transparent. Hmm, this is a song upon which many Renaissance masses were based, you say? I really dislike buzzing on things like that, but this tournament seemed to reward it pretty regularly. There were also quite a few difficulty cliffs where near-giveaway stuff came after pretty in-depth clues. I also had an extreme distaste for the tossup on "speaking," which seemed to beg you to with "tape loops" when it started talking about the Steve Reich clues; I negged on a clue that was describing a piece I had listened to earlier this week.

I was pretty excited by a lot of the opera that came up, and most of the music that I liked that came up was well-written. Overall, I had a good time, and the tournament was well worth playing. Thanks for writing.
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Re: KLEE Discussion

Post by grapesmoker »

theMoMA wrote:Some of the questions from this tournament seemed really, really transparent. Hmm, this is a song upon which many Renaissance masses were based, you say?
Is this a known thing? I'm genuinely ignorant because Renaissance masses mean nothing to me so I'm curious if this is really that famous.
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Re: KLEE Discussion

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

I think that question was probably OK on balance because I don't think a TON of non-music people know what L'Homme Arme is. The way Renaissance masses would sometimes work is that they would pick a "cantus firmus" line to derive musical material from, which was usually something from a popular tune or a chant or another composition. I got in a small argument with our opponent about this, but as far as I have been able to tell, L'Homme Arme is the only melody that ever truly caught on in droves for this practice. The masses I have encountered that use a cantus firmus either use L'homme arme or else they use a work that never got used as cantus firmus again (although there are lots of non-L'Homme Arme based masses in this genre). If there are other examples of a cantus firmus that was popularly used in more than 1 or 2 masses I would like to know what they are, but as is all I can think of is L'Homme Arme.
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Re: KLEE Discussion

Post by Not That Kind of Christian!! »

Jeremy Gibbs Free Energy wrote:I think that question was probably OK on balance because I don't think a TON of non-music people know what L'Homme Arme is.
But how many "non-music people" were playing this arts-specialty tournament?

The clue density of these questions was spot-on, and the vast majority of them were delightfully comprehensible and easy to parse. I question, though, why so many of the choreography questions were so much less accessible than anything else.
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Re: KLEE Discussion

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

Well, I'd hazard a guess that over 60% of the field was not people who know an awful lot about music. Perhaps this is still too many people who do to justify that tossup, but I don't know.
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Re: KLEE Discussion

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

i know that Ave Maris Stella was used by Josquin, Palestrina, and Victoria, and Google seems to reveal a couple of others to me. ("Francisco Courcelle" and "Marc-Antoine Charpentier" are two of the first results.) I'm no expert, of course, so I could be missing something here.
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Re: KLEE Discussion

Post by Sir Thopas »

theMoMA wrote:I also had an extreme distaste for the tossup on "speaking," which seemed to beg you to with "tape loops" when it started talking about the Steve Reich clues; I negged on a clue that was describing a piece I had listened to earlier this week.
Yeah, this one was my bad. If I had thought about it more fully, I would have put something like (accept "tape loop" or equivalent) basically through the power. Instead, I just didn't think about it, and left it out.
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Re: KLEE Discussion

Post by Mike Bentley »

What was the final distribution for this tournament? As a reader, it seemed like Music + Opera made up more than everything else, but it could be possible that this was not actually true.

Also, I thought the question length in this tournament was all sorts of ridiculous. It wasn't even easy things being asked about with 12 line tossups, it was pretty often pretty difficult subjects--even some things that were boredline acanonical. I don't think I saw more than 5 buzzes (probably closer to 1-2) on the first 3 lines of a question. If this tournament is run again I'd think it'd be much better for everyone if a hardcap on tossup length was enforce at, say, 8 lines.

Also, I'd like to apologize for fucking up and reading the wrong packet. Luckily the schedule worked out such that everyone still got to play everyone else and got to play 9 prelim packets before we got kicked out.
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Re: KLEE Discussion

Post by grapesmoker »

Bentley Like Beckham wrote:Luckily the schedule worked out such that everyone still got to play everyone else and got to play 9 prelim packets before we got kicked out.
We got kicked out?
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Re: KLEE Discussion

Post by Mike Bentley »

grapesmoker wrote:
Bentley Like Beckham wrote:Luckily the schedule worked out such that everyone still got to play everyone else and got to play 9 prelim packets before we got kicked out.
We got kicked out?
Err, before we were kicked out (2 AM, which was like 10 minutes after the tournament ended if I remember correctly).
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Re: KLEE Discussion

Post by fluffy4102 »

Jeremy Gibbs Free Energy wrote:I think that question was probably OK on balance because I don't think a TON of non-music people know what L'Homme Arme is. The way Renaissance masses would sometimes work is that they would pick a "cantus firmus" line to derive musical material from, which was usually something from a popular tune or a chant or another composition. I got in a small argument with our opponent about this, but as far as I have been able to tell, L'Homme Arme is the only melody that ever truly caught on in droves for this practice. The masses I have encountered that use a cantus firmus either use L'homme arme or else they use a work that never got used as cantus firmus again (although there are lots of non-L'Homme Arme based masses in this genre). If there are other examples of a cantus firmus that was popularly used in more than 1 or 2 masses I would like to know what they are, but as is all I can think of is L'Homme Arme.
I think L'Homme Arme is definitely the most famous by far outside of England where the In Nomine setting was definitely the most pervasive form of cantus firmus. I haven't heard or read the question, so I can't really understand the context.
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Re: KLEE Discussion

Post by fluffy4102 »

I forgot to mention that the In Nomine setting uses a segment of the plainchant cantus firmus from Taverner's Mass Gloria tibi Trinitas. I'm not sure if that's helpful.
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Re: KLEE Discussion

Post by Captain Sinico »

As Charlie knows, since I was the dude discussing this with him at the time, I wasn't a big fan of the "L'homme arme" question, but I think it wasn't so bad as I thought at the time. I would have appreciated some more early clues about the song itself to disambiguate from other prominent canti firmi, but I suppose that's about all a writer could have done better here. I say that because I don't think anyone's likely to know the individual masses that the tossup starts out with, but it's pretty obvious to those with some knowledge of medieval music (which is probably safe to assume for this tournament only) that we're dealing with an oft-used cantus firmus. My experience and thinking at the time agrees and agreed with what people are here saying, i.e. that "L'homme arme" is probably the single most prominent cantus firmus, but there are other re-used canti firmi; that led to both my having guessed the right answer and the reticence to buzz that prevented me from using my guess. In the final analysis, that was rather a poor play on my part, given that we were down, I was fairly sure Charlie was at least thinking along with me, and I should have seen that I was playing too tight having been burned by reluctance on four of the previous five questions at that point... but I guess that's the advantage of hindsight.

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Re: KLEE Discussion

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

Wasn't In Nomine mostly used for instrumental music, and thus not in the running as an answer to a question that talks about a bunch of choral music?
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Re: KLEE Discussion

Post by fluffy4102 »

Jeremy Gibbs Free Energy wrote:Wasn't In Nomine mostly used for instrumental music, and thus not in the running as an answer to a question that talks about a bunch of choral music?
Yeah, it was mostly instrumental consort music. I didn't realize that the question was calling for a choral work specifically. I misread it as piece instead of song. My bad.
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Re: KLEE Discussion

Post by at your pleasure »

Has this set been posted yet?
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Re: KLEE Discussion

Post by Magister Ludi »

I emailed the set to George last week, but his hard drive is down at the moment. Once he fixes his hard drive then it will be available on the packet archive.
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Re: KLEE Discussion

Post by Auks Ran Ova »

staaaaaaaats?
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