2022 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Elaborate on the merits of specific tournaments or have general theoretical discussion here.
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naan/steak-holding toll
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Re: 2022 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

In other words, this tossup is primarily on material that music pupils, at least in Canada, would be expected to learn in elementary school, which hardly seems ideal for a tournament like ACF Regionals.
Fair points to bring up, but I think translating this kind of knowledge into buzzes at game speed is not exactly an easy task, nor is remembering stuff that you learned 10 years ago.

I would also really like to push back on the assumption that we should take "piano/violin student who started in elementary school" as a baseline for our assessments of classical music theory knowledge. Some people come from homes where learning (and mastering, taking lots of classes on, etc.) an instrument early, including theory, is just expected. Others develop passions for instruments in middle and high school and don't go to high schools, summer camps, conservatories, etc. that have instruction on music theory and therefore learn it in college. Others yet might start playing instruments early, but never really learn a ton of music theory, e.g. I played piano from roughly ages 7 through 17, but wasn't a particularly dedicated student and didn't really get much instruction on music theory apart from the first few years.

So yeah, if you got a conservatory, classical music camp, or similar education in elementary or middle school, then go ahead and buzz on the second or third line. The tossup is doing its job and the rest of us chumps can wait.
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Re: 2022 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by ThisIsMyUsername »

cwasims wrote: Wed Feb 09, 2022 6:19 pm Thanks to Alex and John for the comments on my post – I think it’s useful to try and figure out the best ways to ask about music theory. To be clear, I don’t think this tossup is too “unthemed”: drawing all the clues from music theory certainly makes it thematically coherent (unlike if, say, it decided to also clue some pieces in A major or something). Although I would agree that the clues here are pyramidal, I would still maintain that all of them except the neo-Riemannian theory first line are really pretty easy: from the RCM Music Theory syllabus, inversions of dominant seventh chords are taught contemporaneously with Grade 7 piano (which many people would take at roughly Grade 7 age), Neapolitan chords are tougher (ARCT level) but pretty commonly encountered before then, and then everything else is lower than Grade 7. In other words, this tossup is primarily on material that music pupils, at least in Canada, would be expected to learn in elementary school, which hardly seems ideal for a tournament like ACF Regionals. Furthermore, in my experience, these sorts of clues are extremely common in music theory common links (which are probably also the most common type of theory question), meaning it is in practice a subcategory that draws on material that is substantially easier than probably any other subcategory.
Perhaps no one in all of quizbowl could have more empathy for where this argument is coming from than I do. Indeed, the rationale for my career as a “music mafioso” was basically as you’ve stated: The musical concepts that quizbowl considers forebodingly technical are things that people in the classical music worlds that I inhabit (and that you apparently inhabit too) learned in elementary school. For the longest time, it was considered reasonable to expect that (e.g.) a science editor at a regional or national tournament could speak the language of an upper-level undergraduate, but unreasonable to expect that a music editor at the same tournament could speak the language that my colleagues and I learned when we were twelve years old. It seemed to me that if collegiate quizbowl took the “collegiate” part seriously, questions in each category would draw from each academic subject at the same level of depth, as measured by something like the stage of education at which concepts are taught.

Ultimately, though, I think this reasoning is misguided. Difficulty is, of course, a social property. Once that is acknowledged, one has to decide which social group to use to measure difficulty. By general consensus, the best group to use is the actual population of quizbowlers, not an ideal population in which expertise is evenly spread among categories. When we speak of a tossup’s capacity to produce a pyramidal distribution of buzzes or to fairly gradate among levels of knowledge, or when we speak of aiming for a particular conversion distribution when writing a bonus, we are assessing difficulty relative to a tournament’s intended audience, the actual field of players.

It may be tough to overcome the culture shock of finding graduate-level topics in one subject treated as equivalently difficult to something you learned as a pre-adolescent in music. But conversion data and anecdotal experience suggest that the clues that you are finding too basic are nonetheless serving their function well. Only a change in the demographics of quizbowl players could make higher-level music theory pragmatically useful for cluing. And frankly, the kinds of demographic changes quizbowl is likely to pursue (and should pursue) will probably make classical music theory, if anything, even less accessible.
I should defer to John when it comes to the significance of Neo-Riemannian theory – my claim was based primarily on the fact that I have literally never heard anyone mention it outside of QB (including in the music analysis videos I watch sometimes). Aside from its academic importance, though, it seems to come up with very high frequency in the first lines of music theory tossups in my personal experience, which is probably not ideal and to some extent reinforces some of my concerns with the kinds of clues used in many music theory questions.
It’s possible that it’s overrepresented in quizbowl because the transformations lend themselves to tossup-friendly “computation” (as Alex has called it) in a way that many other music theory concepts do not. (For example, it is considerably more difficult in a tossup to test a player’s ability to permute and transpose a tone row form, even if that is perhaps more widely taught in upper-level theory.)
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Re: 2022 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by CadenPetrosian »

I thought the following question was pretty excellent. I'd love to see more questions take a similar writing approach.

1. Swan bands correspond to emission by a carbon-based example of these molecules with triplet spin multiplicity.
The recombination efficiency of these molecules may be increased by solvent viscosity in the cage effect. Reactions
involving these molecules produce a nonthermal distribution of nuclear spins in an effect misleadingly named for
dynamic nuclear polarization, CIDNP (“kid-nip”). These molecules are produced by the decomposition of benzoyl
peroxide, as well as by initiators to start chain-growth polymerization reactions. Homolytic bond cleavage produces
two of these molecules, which are shown with an odd number of Lewis dots, indicating a half-filled orbital. For 10
points, name these reactive molecules with unpaired electrons.
ANSWER: free radicals [accept diradicals; accept radical initiators]
<Chemistry>
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Re: 2022 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by Subotai the Valiant, Final Dog of War »

naan/steak-holding toll wrote: Tue Feb 01, 2022 5:16 pm I really like the idea behind this Haydn tossup's clues, reflecting him being a towering figure among contemporaries, including the other leading Germanic composers of the era. That being said, I think there are a couple of issues:

1) Evasiveness. Ophir's guide on this topic is instructive here. Is there a particular reason that the first clue can't say "piano sonata" instead of "work" or the second clue can't say "string quartet" instead of "chamber piece?" I think adding those details doesn't exactly make things transparent (since at that point the question just says "this person") and also helps people who may know of the existence of these pieces, but can't interpret more technical musical terms; it also helps give players as much context as possible to parse out the score clues.

2) Clues that require drawing multiple strings together without appropriate context to tee them up. Here, I'd draw attention to "This composer’s brother likely inspired the fugal finale beginning C-D-F-E in a younger composer’s final symphony." Looking at this question, it's reasonable to parse out what we're going for here - Mozart is generally thought to have borrowed the C-D-F-E motif (which predates the Haydn brothers) from Michael Haydn's masses. But on the fly, you just get "younger composer" (could be anyone) and "final symphony" (again, could be anyone) - sure, you can make an inference about the period we're talking about since "Mannheim rocket" was mentioned in the first clue, but we're already a couple sentences away from that.
I'd agree with Will's comments here. I was sufficiently unsure about the first clue, despite knowing that piano sonata very well and knowing that Beethoven's early piano sonatas were dedicated to Haydn, to not buzz on it. It also didn't help that the score clue was itself a bit ambiguous in its wording, describing the Mannheim rocket going from the fourth beat of bar 0 to the first note of bar 2 as being "two measures," as it's certainly shorter than two measures in length (I'd say 1.5 at best; personally I'd call it 1 measure since the actual ascending arpeggio goes for only one measure and the following repetitions of the same motif don't even have the upbeat) and exists in three distinct bars. This is obviously nitpicking, but as Will said, every ambiguity makes a difference when the player is already unsure due to the nature of score clues. And I only buzzed on the "this composer's brother likely inspired" because I'd heard that clue many other times for Jupiter; I'm honestly not sure I would have parsed that otherwise.

Having said that, I absolutely loved this question and its concept and was very happy to hear it in contrast to the high amount of American/contemporary music in the set (I think this was mentioned in general discussion). Great job to whoever wrote it.
Daniel, Hunter College High School '19, Yale '23
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