Stories about the shenanigans in the voting rooms at international music competitions are legion. The first Tchaikovsky Competition was held in Moscow in the cold war atmosphere of 1958. One of the Soviet jury members, the great Ukrainian pianist Sviatoslav Richter, is said to have awarded the American Van Cliburn full marks and given zeros to the others.
And Arthur Rubinstein gave either full marks or zeros in the Tel-Aviv competition which carries his name. He justified this by saying, either you can play the piano or you can't.
The voting system for the AXA Dublin International Piano Competition was set up to avoid such scenarios. There is no actual scoring system until the finals. So when this year's 15 jury members voted at the end of the first round all they had to do was to write down their personal choice of 24 from the 44 players they had just heard. Any ties for the last place or places would have been resolved by a second vote between the tied candidates. The tactical voting of other systems is simply bypassed. All a juror votes on is his or her desire to hear a specific list of players in the next round.
Because of Ireland's rare and complex system of proportional representation, everyone and anyone seems to have a decent grasp of the different outcomes that can be expected from Irish-style PR and Britain's first-past-the-post straight vote. But not even the most avid of piano competition followers seem to realise that the international AXA jury is just an electorate like any other, and subject to the vagaries of a voting system. So the outcome of the piano competition depends on the voting system as well as the actual intentions of the jury.
Competition jurors are as human as the rest of us, and a juror's shortlist for the top place can be very short indeed. AXA jury chairman John O'Conor has said of Antti Siirala, who took the top prize in 2003: "By the end of the first line of the first movement of the Mozart Sonata, K533, I think the whole jury had decided that this was the first prize winner."
But let's assume that individual jurors have a serious interest in hearing, say, five or 10 or maybe 15 of the competitors in the second round. The rules still compel them to fill a list of 24, and, inevitably, the lower-down choices will end up being a bit arbitrary, as they discriminate between players who have not greatly excited them.
Yet, in the AXA system, a vote is a vote is a vote. And 15 mentions for a name at the bottom of everyone's list scores more highly than an over-the-moon enthusiasm that 12 jurors may feel for their shared top choice.
Yep. It's that simple. We all know that topping the poll in an Irish election is no guarantee of being elected - Mary Robinson's election as President in 1990 being one of the most striking proofs of that. By contrast, what the AXA system effectively does is regard all 24th-preference votes as having exactly the same weight as all first-preference votes.
So, in preventing the effects of tactical voting, the competition employs a system which can bring about the elimination of musically interesting pianists and the advancement of less interesting ones, even within the terms of the jury's own tastes and preferences.
It seems absurd, but that's how it is right up to the finals, when a form of proportional representation was used to declare Frenchman Romain Descharmes last week's €12,000 first prize winner.
Music competitions no longer have the lustrous reputations they enjoyed up until the 1970s. There are so many of them it's simply confusing. This year's AXA competitors between them already boasted over 30 first prizes in international competitions. Students play at competitions where their teachers are on the jury, an issue which continues to fuel acrimonious debate. Over a third of this year's AXA competitors listed jury members among their teachers. And with so many competitions to be judged, it is usually not the Richters and Rubinsteins of the world who are doing it.
John O'Conor set out to rock the boat a little when the first Dublin competition in 1988 allowed complete freedom of recital repertoire. There are a few more ploys he could now consider to shake up the competition world a little. The AXA voting system would surely benefit from reform and transparency. Let the votes be weighted in every round, and let all the voting be made public, so that anyone's suspicions can be allayed.
There are other avenues worth exploring. The barring of current pupil/jury member connections would quieten a lot of speculation. And, at least in the earliest rounds, the use of blind auditioning, with the competitors out of view behind acoustically transparent screens, would be worth considering. Blind auditioning wrought radical improvements on women's prospects at orchestral auditions. Who knows what changes it might bring to the world of competitive music-making?