mrsmiley4 wrote:2) Biography Bowl. Why do I have to complain about this? I thought the circuit as a whole had moved away from this type of question. While it's true that you don't get the questions in the form of "Born in X in year Y, his father was a dog-botherer and he went to school at Whattsamatta U" much anymore, there are still more questions than I can count where the lead in is completely extraneous information about the person's life. If you REALLY can't find any biographical information about the person pertaining to his/her work, for the love of God write about something else.
3) Music tossups with leadins describing musical form or notation. I have NEVER heard anyone get a music tossup from this information. Tossups move too fast for anyone to really get an idea of what sound the question is trying to describe, and anyway unless you have perfect pitch you're probably going to be out of luck anyway. ("This piece starts with a C major chord moving to triplets"? WTF? I can think of at least three pieces of quizbowl canonical music that fit that description.) Moreover, unless notation is REALLY famous-- like, for instance, the Largo in the New World Symphony-- it's impossible to apply that to the question unless you've actually played the piece and remember what the notation was. Write about themes, or how the piece was written and for whom, or SOMETHING, but musical description is worthless.
Can you give some examples of this? I'm just curious to know whether this was a problem at PARFAIT or some earlier event, and what sort of information the questions included.
I have to strongly disagree with this. I've seen multiple players answer questions on musical works based on an initial description. I think this is not at all a useless leadin.
mrsmiley4 wrote:1) Booker Prize Lit. PLEASE STOP DOING THIS. Most of the books that have won the prize are too recent for us to appraise their overall significance to the literary canon (and moreover, almost nobody on the circuit has read them).
mrsmiley4 wrote:Write about themes, or how the piece was written and for whom, or SOMETHING, but musical description is worthless.
recfreq wrote:...btw, "From the" is _definitely_ required...
ImmaculateDeception wrote:Incidentally, I don't agree with this. It is exceedingly common at all levels of discourse to hear this work refered to as simply the "New World" symphony and, as it's not a work of literature and, therefore, wouldn't necessarily have an exact title (though it may be the case that it does), any common referent should be acceptable. I'll also wager that, regardless of the title in the original language, there are versions with the English title "New World Symphony" so, even were this a work of literaure, that title must still be acceptable by any reasonable criterion.
recfreq wrote:The opening of the Adagio in this work is quoted near the end of the Largo, while the Scherzo combines both of the previous movement's themes in a coda.
just look at any catalog, score, or CD cover
mattreece wrote:I know you already said that sentence needs work, but I think it's pretty contentless as written.
ReinsteinD wrote:http://store.acousticsounds.com/images/as60gif/CRCA-66376-SA.jpg
http://www.mvdaily.com/articles/2000/06/bmg75605.jpg
http://www.feinarts.com/images/new%20wo ... mphony.jpg
mrsmiley4 wrote:The question as heard at the tournament was changed around a bit
recfreq wrote:
As far as I'm concerned a creative work in any media deserves the same level of stringency or lack thereof, there's no difference b/t musical composition and literary composition in regards to titles. E.g. I've seen _Tale of Genji_ or _Genji monogatari_ underlined; I think it should be _Genji_ monogatari.
Sorry, now we're really off track.
This man lost part of his nose in a duel with Manderup Parsbjerg, a Danish noble. After witnessing an eclipse while he was a student at the University of Copenhagen, he began to study astronomy, but he did not build his first observatory at Herrevad Abbey until after his father’s death. In 1599, due to disagreements with Christian IV of Denmark, he moved to Prague, where he met his assistant, Johannes Kepler. Who is this Danish astronomer, who repudiated the heliocentric theory, but whose detailed collections of astronomical data were later used to prove heliocentrism and Kepler’s laws of planetary motion?
Answer: Tycho Brahe
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