That being said, I’d just like to take note of some minute inaccuracies in score clues that have surfaced at some time or another. This wouldn’t be of interest to the majority of people, but I think it may still serve as an impediment to the small fraction of people that care about them.
For instance, here is the lead-in to the music tossup in Finals 1 of 2016 ACF Nationals, which was read live:
The piece (Nuages gris) that this refers to is actually in G minor, so this E minor-centered theme that’s written doesn’t make much sense. It’s relatively simple to deduce what happened in the transcription here; the right hand is written in bass clef, but reading the notes in treble clef (which is the predominant clef of the right hand in piano music) indeed gives the notes in the question. It’s a lead-in to a Finals question of Nationals, so the piece referenced is rather minor, but it’s still a mistake that may have deterred a buzz on the biggest stage of the game.This noun appears in the title of a short piece that opens with a rising and falling theme in the right hand that goes B, E, A-sharp, high B, G, E before the left hand begins playing a tremolo alternating between B flat and A natural.
Other, more recent examples of this are rather unfortunately clustered in 2021 Chicago Open. For example, a clue on the Hallelujah Chorus was given as the following in a bonus part: “long high D, followed by short notes G, A, G.” The Hallelujah Chorus is pretty famous and those who have heard the piece before should be able to get it off its most famous score clue, but the clue is incorrect; the notes should be A, B, A. Another tossup in CO 2021 on Sibelius’s 5th symphony has the clue right out of power as “B-flat, up a fifth to E-flat, back down to B-flat.” My guess is that the notes are reversed, and B-flat should be substituted with E-flat and vice versa, because as written the clue is not only wrong in terms of accuracy but also a fifth above B-flat isn’t E-flat. Other minor things from CO 2021 are the score clue in the tossup on Mendelssohn citing the Reformation symphony’s theme as containing an F (as opposed to F-sharp) and the tossup on La campanella saying the piano plays a high D-flat repeatedly (as opposed to D-sharp).
A lot of these things are really minor, but I do think that perhaps slightly more care should be taken to ensure the veracity of score clues. They’re really only a very small fraction of quizbowl mechanics, but if it’s going to come up at all, it should do so in a way that aids the player who’s able to understand it, rather than deter them. Score clues are already quite hard to parse at game speed even as someone who is able to do so.
