Itineraries - Festival Adjudications

Review: An Adjudicator Speaks Out Against Too Much Competition
The Ottawa Journal. Thursday, April 22, 1971.

By EUNICE GARDINER Assistant Women's Editor

"Schools must not be used to turn out 'production-line' musicians."

Dr. Damiana Bratuz, lecturer and performer for the past three years on the University of Western Ontario's Faculty of Music, said that schools' music programs must be expected though to turn out literate audiences.

"After all, teaching of music should never be aimed at making performers of everyone. No one would expect a sports program to make an Olympic champion of every Little Leaguer."

Adjudicating this week at the Ottawa Music Festival, Dr. Bratuz has told her audiences and young competitors that she looks upon "the spirit of competition as a virtue. But the greatest beauty lies in creative activity, not in the end product."

The eloquent young graduate of Trieste Conservatory continued her studies in Salzburg and in Paris, before working for her doctorate in performance on a Fulbright award at the University of Indiana. That university is rapidly becoming the Bayreuth of the Americas. Indiana U now has 1,500 majors, and seven orchestras, she said.

Her lectures have taken her across Canada. Late in May, Dr. Bratuz will address the meeting of the Ontario Registered Music Teachers In Stratford.

Dr. Bratuz believes that too much emphasis has been placed upon competition for this young generation. "I can see that it has brought frustration and depression. Destructive tendencies result.

"And unfortunately when bad habits are acquired, it's too late for me to correct the most of them; at university level.''

She says that it took her three years of work before her students at London wanted master classes Saturday mornings at which they can listen to stringed instruments, recordings and then talk. "Too many have been turned off, and I'm convinced that it happened in high school years."

"It's tragic. In my experience all little children are geniuses. But they're no longer geniuses when they get into our high schools."

So that she may adjudicate and write, Dr. Bratuz has put aside concert work for a time.

While in the mid-West she found mirrored in her life, all the days of her childhood. "It was a rather unhappy time as a member of a minority group. We were neither Italian nor Yugoslav, but here in Canada we've found attitudes
toward ethnic groups allow us to cherish traditions. Traditions must never be held jealously, but they must be loved." One of her favorite writers is Canadian Farley Mowat. The book she's now writing is autobiographical.

Having found a folk element in the work of Bartók, Dr. Bratuz wrote and published a book for teachers. And when there's time she hopes to extend her teaching in the direction of television programming for children.