What Adjudicators Look for at a Music Festival
The North of Perth Music Festival has been running since 1957 and every single participant, regardless of category or result, walks away with a personal report from a qualified adjudicator. That report is often the most useful thing a competitor takes home. Understanding what adjudicators are watching for before audition day changes how you prepare and how much you gain from the experience.
The Role of a Qualified Adjudicator
Adjudicators at a performing arts festival are practising professionals or experienced educators in their discipline, whether that is piano, strings, voice, instrumental or speech and drama. Their job is not simply to rank competitors but to assess each performance against established criteria and translate that assessment into a written report the competitor can read and act on. A ranking tells you where you sat on the day; a written report tells you why, and what to do next. For teachers entering students in a festival like this one, that personal report is often the primary reason for entering.
Technical Accuracy: the Baseline, Not the Ceiling
Every adjudicator begins with technical accuracy because it is the foundation everything else rests on. For pianists and string players, that means correct notes, correct rhythms and secure intonation. For singers, it means pitch accuracy, breath support and clear vowel formation. For speech and drama, it means accurate text, articulation and controlled pace.
Technical accuracy is the entry point for assessment, not the finish line. Adjudicators are experienced enough to distinguish a momentary slip from an ingrained technical habit, and covering a mistake cleanly and continuing, rather than stopping to restart, is itself a sign of stage readiness. How a performer recovers tells an adjudicator a great deal about how prepared they genuinely are.
What Does Musical Interpretation Actually Mean in Practice?
Interpretation means the choices a performer makes beyond what the notation dictates: shaping a phrase, deciding where a climax lands, choosing how much space to give a cadence. Adjudicators look for evidence that the performer has formed a genuine understanding of the piece rather than simply reproducing what a teacher demonstrated.
Practical signals include dynamic contrast (not just loud and soft, but the gradations between them), phrase direction (does the musical line go somewhere, or does each bar sound equal?) and stylistic awareness (a Baroque piece played with heavy Romantic rubato is a mismatch that an experienced adjudicator will note). Reports will typically name the specific passage where interpretation was convincing and where it needed more conviction, giving the teacher a precise rehearsal target for the next cycle of preparation.
Stage Presence and Presentation
Stage presence is the criterion most families underestimate because it cannot be drilled the way scales can. It is not about being extroverted; it is about ownership of the performance space. An adjudicator notices whether a competitor walks on with purpose, acknowledges the audience before beginning, holds the ending rather than dropping character immediately, and exits with composure.
For speech and drama competitors, this extends to eye contact, use of space and whether physical choices support or contradict the text. For instrumentalists, it includes posture and whether body language communicates engagement or anxiety. None of this requires a child to be a natural showman; it requires deliberate preparation, and it is entirely coachable in the weeks before sessions begin.
How the Written Report Works and How to Use It
At the North of Perth Music Festival, every participant receives a personal report from qualified adjudicators. That personal report is the most transferable thing a competitor takes home, and its value depends almost entirely on what happens with it after the festival.
Teachers who use eisteddfod reports well bring them into the next lesson and treat each observation as a lesson objective. If a report notes that a singer's consonants were swallowed in the middle register, that becomes a focused week of work on consonant placement in that part of the voice. If a piano report mentions that the left hand was overwhelming the melody in a particular passage, the student marks that bar and works it separately. Treated as a coaching document rather than a scorecard, a single adjudicator report can drive several months of productive practice.
Does the Category Level Affect How Adjudicators Assess Performances?
Yes, directly. Adjudicators calibrate their expectations to the listed category, whether that is a beginner grade, an open age group or a championship class. A junior competitor in a beginner piano section is not assessed against the same benchmark as an open age string player. Entering the wrong level in either direction reduces the quality of the feedback: entering too low means the report has little room to stretch the performer; entering too high means the technical gap becomes the entire focus. The festival offers categories across piano, strings, singing, instrumentals and speech and drama for participants of all ages, so there is a genuine range to choose from.
What Adjudicators Note That Competitors Rarely Expect
A few things consistently appear in reports that surprise competitors and parents.
- Tempo consistency. Many performers rush in technical passages and slow in lyrical ones. Adjudicators notice this in both directions and will name the specific section where pulse became unstable.
- Suitability of repertoire. Adjudicators will sometimes note when a piece is clearly beyond a performer's current technical level or, conversely, when it sits well below it. Both observations carry implications for the teacher as much as the student.
- Commitment to the ending. Dropping character or posture the moment the final note sounds is one of the most common observations in reports. The performance is not over until the performer has left the performance area.
- Stylistic consistency. A performer who plays or sings with genuine style for two thirds of a piece and then loses it in a difficult passage will have that noted. Consistency across the whole performance, not just the easy sections, is what adjudicators are watching for.
Preparing to Get the Most from Adjudicator Feedback
The competitors who benefit most from a festival are those who arrive prepared enough to actually absorb the feedback rather than being consumed by survival anxiety on stage. The piece needs to be secure well before audition day, and the performance needs to have been run in front of at least a small live audience beforehand. Students who understand that the personal report is a prize in itself, regardless of what ribbon they receive, tend to engage with it far more productively.
The North of Perth Music Festival has been running for over 69 years and has had alumni including Heath Ledger and Lisa McCune pass through at early stages of their development. With $11,000 in prize money, gold medallions, trophies and certificates available across all categories, and a $2,500 cash prize from Zenith Music for the Most Outstanding Performance, the competitive stakes are real. But the written report from a qualified adjudicator is what a performer is still reading and using long after the results are posted.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I enter the North of Perth Music Festival?
Entries are submitted via the entry form on the festival website. For 2026, entries are now closed. Sessions run Saturday 5 September to Sunday 20 September at The Rise in Maylands, with Winners' Concerts on Saturday 10 October (Juniors) and Sunday 11 October (Seniors) at the Wellington Room, Morley Recreation Centre.
What categories are available for entry?
The festival runs categories in piano, strings, singing, instrumental and speech and drama, and is open to participants of all ages.
What prizes and awards are on offer?
There is $11,000 in prize money available across the festival, along with gold medallions, trophies and certificates. Zenith Music sponsors the main award, a $2,500 cash prize for the Most Outstanding Performance.
Does every participant receive adjudicator feedback?
Yes. Every performer receives a personal report from qualified adjudicators, regardless of their result. That written feedback is one of the core reasons teachers enter their students in the festival year after year.
Which notable performers have come through this festival?
Lisa McCune and the late Heath Ledger are among the alumni who performed at the North of Perth Music Festival during their early development. Heath Ledger won the Most Outstanding Speech and Drama Item in 1995, going on to win a posthumous Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 2009 for his role as the Joker in The Dark Knight.
Who runs the North of Perth Music Festival?
The festival is run in association with the City of Bayswater, which is its major sponsor. It began in 1957 as the North Perth Methodist Music Festival and has been a fixture of the Perth community arts calendar ever since. For any enquiries, the festival can be reached on 0409 292 876 or at the contact page.