h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

As you may know, I'm in our school's senior wind band, which is all very fine and well (unless I'm made to play my trombone). The thing is, our power-hungry conductor (known as the Durno) decided to make us more than an ordinary school band by introducing us to choral music, and even getting a £7000 lottery grant.

Every year we try out for the National Concert Band Festivals, and usually we get through the regional bit to go on to the big one in Manchester. And usually we win Gold there, too. So there's always pressure on the band to do well, and this year there was even more, because of the grant.

We got Bronze.

We didn't play too badly, at least I didn't think so. But out of the six schools that entered, one got a Gold and five got Bronze. Nobody thinks this was fair, since the only school to get Gold was a music school and shouldn't have been in the competition anyway, and the other five all managed to get Gold in regional finals, so they can't have been that bad.

Apparently they changed the scoring system, so that the judges can't just say "They sound good, they've played a hard programme, let's give them Gold" but now have to tick boxes like "The band always played in tune." By the old music system, playing easy music well would not earn you as good a medal as playing difficult music well. Not any more.

So my question is this, does anybody know why they'd change the system without telling any of the conductors? Thank you.

Sorry for the long rant, but it's been a long week.

~~A~~