The Quizbowl Resource Center

Not all the details for this tournament have been finalized yet. I'm just posting this now because I'm about to embark on a trip where I won't have Internet access. I will add more specific information once I return and Connor and I hammer out the details.

We hope to run this tournament at one of the summer opens if possible, but for now, all we can say is that we'll run it eventually.

Questions will be written by me and Connor Teevens from MSU. There will most likely be a total of five packets with both tossups and bonuses (21/21). Questions will be no longer than eight lines long. Our intended difficulty is still to be decided, but we can say that a) it definitely will be harder than regular difficulty classical music, and b) it probably won't be as hard as many other side tournaments like CO Lit, if only because there haven't been many (or any, as far as I know) purely music-based side tournaments.

There will probably be more clues based in theory and orchestration than in most classical music questions, but not radically. Opera will be a smaller component of this tournament than of most quiz bowl classical music questions. There will be roughly equal amounts of 17th/18th century, 19th century, and 20th/21st century material, with some medieval and Renaissance material thrown in.

Before people compete on these questions, we'd like to have at least one person knowledgeable about classical music either playtest them or look them over. Let us know if you're interested (well, once we figure out where it's going to be played). We'll probably have it done by mid-July, and we have some questions already written.

Looks interesting. The Jean-Baptiste Lully Memorial (Chicago Open 2010 Fine Arts Side Event) is the only similar side event that I can think of, but that was not pure CM. I don't know if I will be playing anything this summer, unfortunately. But I would be interested in playing it.

When will this be run at CO?

That´s probably the main thing we have to resolve. If we can´t find a time slot, we obviously can´t run it. Currently, I am in Ecuador with Internet access that´s intermittent at best, but I´ll try to work something out when I return in a couple days.

Predictably, given that Sunday of CO weekend is taken up primarily by Will's lit tournament and CO History doubles, Saturday night already faces the threat of being broken up by police, and Friday is just hectic, we'll have to find some other time to run this. But it will happen...eventually.

Why not KABO?

Andrew Hart posted something in the MO thread a while ago to gauge interest of playing it there.

To be clear about why I didn't hold this at KABO: I think Mike Cheyne assumed that this set was nearly complete, but it's not. We (by which I mean, I) have questions written, and I have many answer lines chosen, but it's quite far from being ready to play. I made a conscious decision not to work on it, and instead choose projects of greater priority for me, like the UD/MSU housewrite. That wasn't the decisive factor, though - more important was the fact that KABO weekend already seemed pretty full, and also the selfish motive that I wanted to be certain that I could be there to hear this be read.

At this point, I would be highly amenable to metamorphosing this completely into a TU-only tournament, with more packets (I'm thinking 8). I think this would be both more fun for me to write and for people to play. Connor hasn't responded to this idea yet, and in general he seems not to be too invested, so I'll probably be writing the bulk of the questions. I'm entirely fine with that, given the extra time we now have.

From this description, it probably seems like this is a mess right now, but I now have a clearer idea of what I'll be doing and how I'll be doing it than I did before.